First I installed XP on my drive leaving free space for Redhat. Then I installed Redhat and it used a utlity whose name I forget to give me the option of booting to Redhat or DOS. That was working fine but later I had to reinstall XP and when I did that I let the XP installer delete the XP partition and recreate it in the freespace not occupied by the Linux partitions. Now it boots straight to XP. I tried making the Linux boot partition the active one again using fdisk but when it boots it just gives an error loading operating system error. How can I get that Linux boot partition the default boot loader again? Did I mess it up by deleting and recreating the XP partition it used to point to?

Boot your PC with Red Hat installation first CD. In the boot brompt Press F5 for rescue mode. You will be asked for password of root. Then your Linux file system will be mounted.

If you are using LILO boot loader, just run lilo at shell prompt and reboot.
You will get the LILO OS selection screen.

with wishes
swamytk

Thanks, I did the rescue thing. At the end it sent me to the shell and asked me to run a chroot command and I did that. Still when I reboot though it goes straight to windows XP. The boot loader I was using was GRUB, not LILO. From the shell I ran grub. It lists a few commands but I don't know which of those to run. Most wanted me to follow the command with a filename. So I don't really know what to do if anything at that point.

Hi mike,

Yes. almost done. Since you had dual boot running properly already before Xp reinstallation, just you have to install GRUB again... (no need to configure again! hope you have not changed the boot partition of Windows XP while reinstalling) very simple.. just run

grub-install

This will do. reboot the machine. You will have nice Grub GUI Boot prompt! Enjoy!!!!

with wishes
swamytk

Thanks I ran grub-install at the shell prompt and it ran something. It displayed some commands I could use. I ended up running "grub-install install_device" without any options inbetween. I rebooted and it still went right to XP. I know I could just reinstall Redhat again and get it working but I've spent so much time configuring my other install plus I would just like to know how to do it. Any ideas?