All,

After an exasperating experience with Fedora, I decided to go with RH9 which managed to install successfully.

I want a dual boot system.

I can get RH9 to load from my boot disk or from startup (but this requires me to turn off my SATA HD where XP lives)

FWIW, XP HD is /dev/sda2 and RH9 is on /dev/hda2

By looking at output of df command, boot is loaded on /dev/hda1

I copied the linux.bin file to a floppy, copied that file to my C:/ drive and then adjusted my boot.ini file to point it toward linux.bin

That all worked fine.

However, when I select RH9 from the windows bootloader, it just hangs on a blank screen with a blinking cursor.

I've deleted the linux line from my boot.ini file, and now I'm back to where I started; RH9 successfully installed, but unable to access unless I boot from a floppy or turn sda2 to the "off" position in the BIOS.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

H

Hi

I'm not sure what is the problem. I've always loaded linux through windows loader without problems but in my case both of them were always on the same HD.

I suppose you have installed grub on /dev/hda1 (IDE) to load linux. If this is true, you can use grub loader to load both windows and linux. The only advantage of using windows loader is that you don't need to change the MBR of the HD your windows is installed on, but as you have it in a separate HD, you can use grub without changing the MBR of the windows HD.

First, you need you BIOS to check your 'hda' before your 'sda'. I think you can change it in your 'boot drive order' of your BIOS. After you should be able to boot linux without turning of your SATA.

Second, configure grub to boot windows XP on your 'sda'.

I've found another thread where a similar problem is exposed:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/205926

ntrepid8 solved the same problem this way so I hope you can solve it too.

Iban.