Dual-OS boot issue
 

Hello,

I am using a machine that was setup for dual-boot with Windows XP and Redhat linux 9 on separate hard disks. GRUB was the bootloader.

The machine was booting fine until I attached another hard disk with Fedora Core 3 (FC) to it. I did a fresh installation of FC.
Now, when I start this machine without the FC hard disk, I get "GRUB hard disk error" message. With FC disk, the machine can load GRUB from FC and move on. It even shows an entry for Windows and I can boot Windows from there.

When I mount the RH9 disk under FC, I can see all the partitions and the /boot partition has a grub.conf. So all the data is there.

What is wrong here?
The MBR in RH9 disk looked bad..so I reinstalled GRUB in MBR.That doesn't help.

After Googling, it looks like "GRUB hard disk error" is from stage 1.

Thanks for any help.

It appears that you installed GRUB as part of the Fedora install. In the process, it put the GRUB config files on the Fedora drive.

One easy fix would be to attach the Fedora drive and boot into RH9. Then install GRUB from there. Before rebooting, open the (RH9) /boot/grub/menu.lst and make sure it is correct for RH9 and Windows. Then you can add entries for Fedora.

Things to keep in mind:
GRUB always has to be installed pointing to the location of its files. The "root" command in the installation does that.
If your Fedora disk is a USB, it could get mounted differently on occassion--eg if a card reader were installed. That can screw up the booting process. (I avoid this by keeping all OSes on one internal harddrive.)

The booting link below might also be useful.

I installed GRUB from RH9 after booting into it. On reboot,I see the same problem.I verified /boot/grub/grub.conf and it looks fine.

The BIOS device configuration has
IDE primary 0 -> Windows disk
IDE primary 1 -> Linux disk
In boot order of BIOS,I see C:\ (other than CD-ROM,floppy etc).
Shouldn't I see two drives?

c:\boot.ini in Windows has no entry for linux.

Hi, As with most programs, I've always found it easier to dual boot using the bios. That way all the files are put on the drive. I'm running Windows
XP Pro (160G drive set up as IDE1) and Suse 10.2 (40G set up as Ide0). I've been running this Setup for almost a year now. Never had a single problem with it. and I've got suse configured to access the XP drive. Everytime I've tried using a boot loader program, one or the other os Crashes. and with the bios on most new computers, you can boot to all 4 IDE drives.

Thanks,

Robert

First of all, Fedora Core 3 and Red Hat 9 are pretty old, you should consider getting fedora 7 and getting rid of Red Hat since Fedora and Red Hat are basically the same, there is no point in dual-booting them
Second of all, did you install grub in fedora to the mbr or to the / of the fedora parition?