BigDH01

It is an IS7-E. I changed the boot order in the bios leaving the SATA (raptor) as the first boot device. What I don't understand is that GRUB is installed and working in the boot sector of my SATA drive, yet Windows is the only OS booting but it is on the last drive of the boot sequence. This makes no sense to me at all. The computer should look at the SATA drive first as it does have priority in the BIOS. GRUB is installed and working (confirmed) on the SATA drive. If I unplug the PATA Windows drive, Linux will boot up by default. I think the SATA implementation of my Abit MB is defective or Windows is just that good at being the one and only. Right now, Linux should be the primary OS if my config was the only thing considered. I think my M/B is lying to me. BTW, in case you were wondering: 2.8C@ 3.5 Water cooled IS7-E i865 Radeon 9800 Pro VIA envy 24 37 GB raptor 160 GB seagate 80 GB WD 8MB cache

Ok. I tried what I said. I unplugged the SATA drive and the data PATA drive and Windows had no trouble formatting and installing itself like it did before. So I figured once it was up and running that I'd simply plug in the SATA drive and let GRUB do the rest. However, now that I have all the drives plugged in the computer goes right into Windows. The SATA should be the first drive in the boot order but instead it goes straight to NTLDR on the Windows PATA drive. Any ideas how to get this working that doesn't involve shutting the computer down and plugging in the drive I want to use and unplugging the other?

Ok, how about this. What if I use fdisk and put FAT32 or something on the drive, then remove all the other drives so Windows can't see the other linux partition on my other drive. This would force Windows to put NTLDR on my 3rd drive. Couldn't I then setup windows and reconnect my other drives which would cause the SATA drive to move to the front of the line in the BIOS for boot order. GRUB would send me into linux. Couldn't I edit GRUB to do chainloading at this point? It should work.

I recently downloaded FC4 and I must say that I love it generally. It was hard to initially install because I have 3 hard drives (SATA containing the Windows partition) and I wanted to place FC4 on the 3rd hard drive or the last hard drive in the boot order in the BIOS. I could get it installed but could not get GRUB to work correctly. This doesn't surprise me as I can't get Windows to install correctly unless I unplug both the PATA drives. For some reason it hates to put NTLDR on the SATA drive. So... I just wiped windows and unplugged the PATA drives and installed FC4. Obviously, being my first time the road has been somewhat bumpy. Here are some things I would really appreciate some help with: 1. I wiped my 3rd drive of all partitions (it had linux partitions from the previous install attempts). I want to install Windows on this drive (I need it for specific applications for school ). When I run Windows installation it can see that drive and the space. However, when I attempt to install it says the drive cannot be formatted. I used the Western Digital diagnostic program and it says the drive is fine and I even wrote all zeroes to it. So then I tried to install Windows to my other PATA drive, that has all my backup on it, which is already formatted in NTFS. When I try to do this, Windows says the drive must be formatted. I cannot format this drive as it has all my important documents on it. Whenever I try to install Windows, it does something to GRUB causing me to have to do a linux rescue and then grub-install --recheck /dev/sda. I'm really getting frustrated with Windows. Any ideas what could be wrong or what I need to do to get windows installed and working? I hate to do it, but I have to run some apps that can only be used on Windows. 2. Is there any search function in XMMS analogous to the search function in Winamp? I kind of liked searching for my media. What is the best way to get my multimedia keyboard commands to function in XMMS? I miss hitting a button on the keyboard and having it control the music. 3. I installed realplayer10 and am using it to stream lectures for a class of mine. This usually works fine, but lately the program will just quit. No errors or warning, it just exits itself. Any idea what could be wrong here? 4. I need to compile some programs using Java5. I am of the understanding that FC4 comes with a Java 5.0 compiler. I'm pretty much a complete newb to this so I was wondering if anyone could give me or point me to the basics of how to get this running and what I need to do. I would really appreciate it. 5. Lots of times when I run yum I'll get an error message at the end saying "nothing to do." It looks like it's working and then it says it cannot find a match or something to that effect. I'm on a school computer right now so I don't have the exact error message. Any idea what is wrong? 6. I would like to use remote desktop to login to a few machines on campus. What program would you recommend for this? I'm sorry for the long list but I really enjoy playing around in linux and seeing what it can do. I would really prefer to use linux all the time but I have quite a collection of windows games , plus I need to use verilog. I would sincerely appreciate any help . Dustin