AdamH

I remember having a 386/16 with a (then) massive 4MB of RAM. So we put in 20MB of RAM (unheard of!)- made a 16MB RAM drive and ran everything from RAM - now that was a quick PC!

Try a live CD such as Knoppix 3.7 as it is very good on hardware detection - see if that successfully uses drivers you had not considered. Have a look on the Nvidia site for any workrounds. Good luck.

Thank you Dan You are the Man! Now booting to Grub from the hard disk. Just two final questions - If I wanted to, how do I remove the grub loader completely and thus restore the boot to Windows XP only? And finally What do you know about Solaris 10? Thanks again.

Hi Still not joy. Have tried all the above and many variations but to no avail usually get this far again: Red Hat nash version 4.1.18 starting Mounted /proc filesystem Mounting sysfs Creating /dev Starting udev Loading jbd.ko module Loading ext3.ko module Creating root device Mounting root filesystem mount: error 6 mounting ext3 mount: error 2 mounting none Switching to new root switchroot: mount failed: 22 umount /initrd/dev failed: 2 Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! This PC is my main XP machine and needs to work - I have others I am quite happy to mess with and get wrong and thus learn. But this machine has my data on it and I would rather not have to start again! I could back it all up and reinstall but that would be tantamount to admitting defeat! Soo how do I reconfigure my MBR to work again - the floppy we have made works - so how do I write that to the HDD so that I do not need the floppy to boot from?

Right then - Mounted Fedora partition and checked version numbers they were correct. Made suggested changes to grub.conf and rebooted. It started to boot but soon failed... the last lines were as below: Red Hat nash version 4.1.18 starting Mounted /proc filesystem Mounting sysfs Creating /dev Starting udev Loading jbd.ko module Loading ext3.ko module Creating root device Mounting root filesystem mount: error 6 mounting ext3 mount: error 2 mounting none Switching to new root switchroot: mount failed: 22 umount /initrd/dev failed: 2 Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! Rebooting into Red Hat I looked at the grub.conf on the Fedora partition, the only line that differed from your suggestion was: kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667 ro root=LABEL=1 rhgb quiet so I tried that - this time Fedora immediately froze with only the lines Booting 'Fedora Core 3' root (hd1,2) Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83 kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet [Linux-bzimage, setup-0x1400,size=0x155da5] initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img [Linux-initrd @ 0x1ff7f000, 0x60e25 bytes] Uncompressing Linux . . . Ok, booting the kernel. audit(1111108441.722:0): initialized Red Hat nash version 4.1.18 starting mkrootdev: label /1 not found mount: error 2 mounting ext3 mount: error 2 mounting none switchroot: mount failed: 22 umount /initrd/dev failed: 2 Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! So there you have it! I hope this suggests something to you. We have updated the grub.conf file successfully but only if using the floppy disk. How do we write that file to the hard disk?

Hi again A little background may be of use. The main installation on this PC is WinXP on 40GB drive C NTFS The same drive has partition with an F drive FAT32 Onto the empty space on this drive I put my first installation of Red Hat which was 2.4.20 several months ago and that was successful. I recently tried to upgrade to 2.6.9 and that was unsuccessful (I will come back to this later) but the installation rewrote the grub file successfully ie. on boot the grub would load and selecting either Red Hat 2.4.20 or Windows would work, even 2.6.9 would start to boot but eventually stop with a kernel panic. However the non-funtioning of 2.6.9 was never a problem, the rest of the system is OK. Then a few days ago having added an 80GB hard drive I had space for another OS so I tried to put Fedora 3 onto empty space on the 80GB drive and then the problem started. The default option on the grub menu is Windows XP not original Red Hat Below is the result of fdisk -l Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 3570 28675993+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hda2 3571 4335 6144862+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/hda3 4336 4865 4257225 83 Linux /dev/hda5 3571 4335 6144831 b Win95 FAT32 Disk /dev/hdb: 81.9 GB, 81964302336 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9964 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 1 2611 20972826 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hdb2 ? 2612 5222 20972857+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hdb3 5223 6527 10482412+ 83 Linux /dev/hdb4 6528 9964 27607702+ 5 Extended /dev/hdb5 6528 6658 1052226 82 Linux swap Thanks again

Hi 3 cheers for Plan B! So I now have a Red Hat floppy disk which offers exactly the same options I had before all this started - as can be seen by the menu.lst file which is below. So how do I write that to the hard disk? And how do we configure Fedora to join in? # grub .conf generated by Anaconda # # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file. # NOTICE: You do not have a /boot partition. This means that all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg. root (hd0,2) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda3 initrd /boot/initrd-version.img #boot=/dev/hda default=2 timeout=10 splashimage=(hd0,2)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz title Red Hat Linux (2.6.9) . root (hd0,2) . kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9. ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi . initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.9.img title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-8) . root (hd0,2) . kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-8. ro root=LABEL=/hdc=ide-scsi . initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.20-8.img title DOS . root noverify (hd0,0) . chainloader +1

Thanks for responding. I do have the original XP and Red Hat disks. I don't recall the Fedora install asking me where to install Grub, I didn't have to choose between MBR or boot partition, but I do remember it asking what to call the other part of the dual boot process and I accepted the default of "Other". I did use the Fedora utility to partition. I used expert partitioning and allocated 10GB of existing free space and (when prompted) 1GB for a swap partition. Alas you are correct I do not have a Red Hat floppy disk!

The grub is (I think) from the original Red Hat. The drives are all IDE and are set up as follows: Primary Master 40GB Primary Slave 80GB Secondary Master CD-RW Secondary Slave DVD-RW Computer Management reports: Disk 0 (C:) 27.35GB NTFS Healthy (System) (F:)5.86 GB FAT32 Healthy 4.06 GB Healthy (Unknown Partition) Disk 1 (G:)20.00 GB NTFS Healthy (H:)20.00 GB NTFS Healthy 10.00 GB Healthy (Unknown Partition) 1.00GB Healthy (Unknown Partition) 25.33 GB Free Space The 4.06 GB partition on Disk 0 is the original Red Hat install The 10.00GB partition on Disk 1 is where I installed Fedora 3 and the 1.00GB partition is the Swap partition I made for Fedora

Hi I have(had!) WInXP and Red Hat 9 happily co-existing and dual-booting using GRUB on my first 40 gb hdd; I added 80 GB as second drive and used half of it, still all fine. Installed Fedeora 3 from DVD Iso to 10GB partition of unused space on 80GB drive. Installation seemed to go OK - however on reboot after POST PC says "Loading GRUB Stage 2..." and sits there forever. If I use The Ultimate Boot CD then I can tell it to make hd0 boot and my WinXP boots fine (phew!). I would like to have back my original boot menu choices of Windows, or Red Hat 9 with the addition of the new Fedora 3. All advice gratefully appreciated.