I've done dual boots in the past, but usually I've installed GRUB into the MBR during Linux installation. This time, I had XP installed first on a family machine, and I'm a bit nervous about messing around with the MBR. I installed Red Hat onto its own hard drive, but I didn't install any additional boot loaders during installation. I've had luck using the GAG loader before. This time it didn't work: when I tried to add the Red Hat installation to the list of operating systems, it gave an error about not being bootable. This has now happened with three separate Red Hat installations: once with Enterprise and twice with Fedora (both latest versions).

My hard drives are:
HDD0: Windows XP (system), NTFS
HDD1: Windows XP (storage), NTFS
HDD2: Red Hat: 101MB boot (EXT3), 75GB Type "8E" (that's what Partition Magic calls it... I let Disk Druid format and partition the drive during installation)

Are there any "quick and easy" fixes for getting this to boot properly after already having performed the installation? Any way to get at the Red Hat files I would need, from inside XP? I have Partition Magic installed, but it isn't much help (its "browse" function isn't showing anything).

Thanks!

Hi, I don't know if this is what you mean, nut this is what I used to do my dual boot

oops,

http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm

Thanks jw2328. From that page:
"The only thing I highly suggest is : your active partition on your first hard disk must be a FAT16 primary partition. This may be a small partition."

Was this the case with your system, or was it more similar to mine? In other words, will this work if the first HDD is a single, NTFS partition?

BOOTPART did not work, because in order to boot a Linux partition, LILO must be installed. If I had LILO installed properly, I wouldn't need a way to boot into Linux.

I then went through the entire Red Hat installation procedure again, this time specifying an upgrade instead of a full install (since I just did one). I was given the option to install a boot manager (GRUB was the only option given), then the "upgrade" took place, but since I wasn't given the option to install/remove/change any packages, the process did not install the boot manager either, since "no kernel packages were installed".

Do I need to go through another full install process, just to install GRUB or another boot manager? Is there a faster, easier way to do this?

Doesn't anyone know the answer? Or is this common knowledge? If so, I can't seem to find it. Please help?

Thanks.

Sorry,

I thought you were just trying to get to lilo without it being on the MBR

I have

hda - 1 big NTFS partition

hdb - Several Linux partitions

To set it up I installed linux on the second drive, and when it asked about boot loaders i told it to not install on the MBR, but on a sector of hdb. I then used that program to allow the win bootloader to point to the linux bootloader on the second disk, meaning that windows was never touched during the install.

I thought you were in a similar position, but if you have no bootloader at all for linux then you need to install one. I guess it will offer you a choice about where to put it. If you choose a sector as I did then you canuse that program to add linux to the win bootloader (the instructions are pretty good on the website). If you choose the MBR, then you need some way of getting back to windows, as it will be inaccesible until you set something up. Either a boot disk or setting grub to point to the win install will do it, but I can't help you with either.

Hope this is some help, I apologise if i've missed the point of what you are doing.

jw2328, thanks for responding. No need to apologize; I just appreciate any help on this.

I used a boot disc and ran through another install for the purpose of installing GRUB or another boot manager, and as I described above, I was given the option to install, and whether to install on the MBR or the first partition of the Red Hat drive (I chose the partition option), but because I didn't install any new kernel packages, I got a "completion" message saying no changes were made. So the boot manager was not installed after all.

What can I do to get it installed?

Am i right in thinking you have no access to RedHat? Did you make a boot floppy or similar when doing the installation. Also does the installation CD have liveCD capabilities? Sorry I don't know redhat at all.

If you have some sort of access then you can install a bootloader using whatever package mechanism redhat uses (does it have apt?)

If i read your last post correctly though it may be easier. Is this right? During the installation (original and the second time) you selected an option to install grub to the first partition of your redhat drive? If you did and it worked then the tool i posted above will work in windows (I assume that the computer just boots straight in to windows when you turn it on) to add redhat to the menu when you boot up. Sorry if I'm barking up the wrong tree.

I know what you're saying, and the tool you mentioned should work at this point, but none of what's happening makes sense to me.

I chose to install the boot manager, but it didn't get installed. The second & third installations, where the only thing I wanted to change was to install the boot manager (I had chosen "do not install" during the original installation process), the installer ended up not installing the boot manager because I chose "upgrade" instead of "full install". Why should I have to perform another full installation, and overwrite the installation I just did, just to install a boot manager?

I may have missed it, but don't recall ever being asked whether I wanted to create boot floppies during installation. I have an "installation boot CD", which lets you boot to the install program and then asks for install CD #1. I have no idea why install CD #1 itself wouldn't be bootable on my system.

So, even though I have a "successfully-installed" Linux operating system, I can't boot it or get into it otherwise.

Ah I see your problem now, and it must be very irritating. I'm afraid you've exceeded my knowledge here now, so I can't be much help.

Four suggestions though, i'm sure they wont work though

1) I wonder if its possible to get some sort of a boot prompt using the installation cd? I doubt it cos that isn't what it is designed for, but you never know.

2) Maybe there is some sort of tool for creation of the boot floppies on the CD, or an option in the installation process. Again I doubt it, as my prompts come when dealing with lilo, and if you can't install it then you aren't going to get any.

3) Is it possible to select a kernel while doing the installation? Changing kernel involves a bootloader config for me, so if it can't find one it MAY put one on, but you never know. Doing an upgrade to another kernel (even an older one, you can always update once you have access) may trigger the bootloader to be installed. Be careful with hardware compatibilty etc if you change kernel though, we don't want to break the system when you are this close. I suspect that if this were possible th installer wouldn't like the fact there was no grub installed and throw a wobbly of some sort.

4) Could a liveCD e.g. Knoppix solve the problem? I'm not sure they're able to install too much though. I 've had no experience with them (fingers crossed) but I know a lot of people use them for rescuing their system


Maybe this is doing it, (my eyes went funny half way down)

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bu.../msg00022.html

Also check this out, seems to cover a lot of eventualities, but maybe not yous exactly

http://www.pcplus.co.uk/tutorials/de...bsectionid=377

(Quick google search pulled up loads of hits, but it would probably take a bit longer to find someone with your exact problem)

Anyway, hope this gives you some idea. Don't give up yet, that new install is so close

Thanks. BTW, I think that second link has a somewhat crucial typo:
‘grub-install /dev/had’
I think they meant to say "hda"; "had" might leave some users scratching their heads...

I can't seem to boot from my install CD (only my boot installer CD), but I'll try the rest and see how far I get.

OK, I got to Linux Resue with a combination of my Red Hat boot CD and first installation CD. I then did:

chroot /mnt/sysimage
grub-install /dev/hdd

The grub-install command reported a list of my three hard disks as follows:
/dev/hda
/dev/hdc
/dev/hdd

Since Red Hat is installed on the third and final disk on my system, I assume that means it's on /dev/hdd (correct?).

The grub-install command said installation completed successfully. But when I rebooted my system, it went straight into Windows as usual.

What else do I need to do?

Well if you think that you got a bootloader this time well done! I guess you are right about the disk thing, though I'm not sure why hdb is missing, so I couldn't be sure.

If you think its there then it needs to be added to the boot menu some how.

Is this right

hda is you XP install

hdc is a data disk with no OS installed

hdd has your linux install

If you put grub on the MBR then i suggest you change your BIOS to boot from the RedHat disk, this should boot you in to it. You can then set up grub to offer XP on its menu (lots of tutorials on this site and google i expect).

If grub is on the root partition of your RedHat drive then I suggest you leave the BIOS alone, and get XP to offer a menu of choices. That site I originally posted can automate that, or it takes a quick dd command in Linux to create the file, then you move it over and edit boot.ini yourself. There will again be instructions on google i expect.

Hope this does the trick, let me know if i got any assumptions wrong.

/dev/hdb is my CD/DVD drive.

I am not 100% sure, but I believe that when I ran grub-install /dev/hdd it installed grub on the drive with the Red Hat partition (hdd). I then used bootpart to add that partition to my boot list. When I tried to boot that partition from the XP boot menu, I got a message similar to "can't boot, insert boot disc and press a key". I pressed a key, and the word "GRUB" printed 22 times on screen, but nothing else happened.