Hi all,
I'm having a SATA hard drive on which Windows XP resides(made as Primary slave in bios) and a IDE hard drive(made as Secondary Master) where i installed Fedora Core 5 recently and after installed successfully and rebooted it did not ask for dual boot and went directly to Windows XP. I've made boot loader to load on MBR when installing Fedora core 5. What can i do to get dual boot option?

Thanks and Rrgds,
Ramki.

Hi,
I met a very similar problem (but my Windows version was old Millennium Edition and I had two IDE drives). I found out that it depended on the GRUB boot loader settings. The Fedora installer did create entries for dual booting Fedora and Windows, but the boot menu was hidden. To solve that, I edited the GRUB configuration file (you need to be root for that), that is, /boot/grub/grub.conf: I commented out the "hiddenmenu" line (to comment, add a # at the start of the line). Further, i had to add four more lines:
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1
as described in the GRUB manual, or else Windows did not start.
Hope this helps!

The most common mistake during installation, is to install Fedora's bootloader options to the MBR of the wrong drive that boots into the bios first.



There is no primary/secondary master or slave designation with sata drives, just what drive is set to boot in the bios first.

If oct326's directions do not work, or are confusing to you (because you do not know how to edit the grub file), also take a look at my guide located here.

Also, look here.

Thanks oct326 and danleff... I however installed Linux again on Sata drive itself and changed the grub.conf file listing of Windows to rootverify (hda0,0), earlier it was rootverify (hda0,4).... problem solved. Now i'm gettign dual boot option. thanks once again.

As from my previous post,i've installed Fedora Core 5. But now i've a big problem. Definitely need help on this!

I installed some some software(don't remember the name) which showed the linux partitions on windows system which i downloaded from net. A seperate drive was created(R drive) and it showed grub folder contents only in it. I deleted the software but the drive did not disappear. I decided to delete the Linux from my system and deleted the Linux Partition using Partition Magic 8. Now here the trouble starts.

I rebooted my system to find grub prompt only and i'm not getting OS selection screen. I tried to install a fresh copy of Win XP(my other OS which was before) but somehow i doesn't start the installation( I have an XP boot disc) It says "Setup is inspecting your computer configuration" and after this it doesn't do anything.

After a few failed attempts of booting through XP cd, now the computer doesn't start atall. Even as i switch on the system power button, i don't see CPU fan rotating. I've a SATA hard drive(160GB) and when i start the computer with IDE hard drive(my spare drive) the system boots!

I'm stuck and Please anyone help me as i don't know what to do and i don't want to loose any data on the drive.

Thanks
Ramki.

Let's go one step at a time.



It would be helpful if you could remember what the software was. It seems from your description, that it was some sort of boot manager software?




If you deleted the Linux partition and some or all of the boot reference files were on that partition, then this is why you are getting the grub "prompt." There are no grub reference files on the system anymore to allow grub to work. Of course, this is assuming that you installed the grub bootloader on the MBR of the hard drive.



It sounds like you corrupted the hard drive with all the changes that you tried to do.

The XP installation disk will not read Linux partitions, if that is what is resident on the beginning of the hard drive. So, the installer fails, as it sees no valid fat32, NTFS or empty hard drive to work from.

Since you used PartitionMagic, did you make recovery floppy disks as recommended after the changes that you made? If so, use the floppy disks to boot the system and ascertain what partitions are on the disk and where they are. Do the boot disks bring up PM and the disk is seen as "bad" meaning that it can't determine valid or consistent partitions on the drive?