I'm reinstalling XP and I have had trouble with Fedora being on the slave drive as I was getting an error 17 (GRUB was planted in the master disk's MBR). Any way, I was wondering will I be able to install Acronis OS Selecter 5 (the only verrsion I have) and choose not to use a bootloader for FC5? Will OS Selector be able to boot FC5 ok with no problems?

I never have used this product, but the answer to your question should be on the Acronis faq page, located here. You apparently have an older version, but the rules should still apply.

However, error 17 usually means that you made a mistake in allocating how grub was installed. In other words, you either did not set up the partitions properly, or the boot order is incorrectly set for the drives in their proper logical order.

Grub should be on the MBR of the master drive, so that it can find the Linux files that it needs properly.

How did you tell grub to be installed when you installed Fedora?

Did you change the physical designations of the drives at all, or change the boot order in the bios after installing Fedora?

See my articles on the subject here and also here.

when I intalled it fc had all 3 of my hard drives ticked so i unticked 2 which left me with the secondry drive, the one i wanted fc to be on.

i selected custom layout and everything seemed fine, GRUB was set in MBR of the master disk, thats all I done.

If you choose Custom layout, then you are telling Fedora that you want to select the partitions (that you either preformatted, or want to create) on the ticked drive. See the Fedora article here.

From the article;

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By choosing this option, you tell Fedora that you want to manually assign and/or create partitions on the ticked drive.

This is why you got the error 17 with grub, no partitions were most likely set, unless you edited the partitions that you created and assigned them as /boot and/or / root partitions.

Since you are installing Windows again, the MBR will be written over and grub will be gone. Re-install Fedora and when you get to the partitioning section during the installation, untick all of the drives, except the one that Fedora will be installed to.

Keep the option to Remove all partitions on selected drives and create default layout and install grub to the MBR of the master drive, which should be hda.

This way you will have Grub on the MBR and can dual boot Fedora or Windows XP.

This all assumes that you did not pre-format the install drive with appropriate Linux partitions before hand, that you want to use.

It also assumes that you want to dedicate the whole drive to Fedora.

I've done has you said but my master drive is hdc??

Ok, I do not get no bootloader so it boots straight in tp XP.

I went in to rescue mode via the FC DVD and type "chroot /mnt/sysimage" (without quotes) and I get an error message saying chroot doesn't exist.

Looks like there are a couple of issues here.

You need to have grub installed to the primary master drive, which should be hda. The map is like so;

hda = primary master
hdb = primary slave
hdc = secondary master
hdd = secondary slave

This assumes that you are using IDE drives, not sata drives.

XP boots straight up, as you most likely installed grub to the MBR of the Fedora drive, not the one that XP is on, which should be hda, unless you have changed the boot oder of the hard drives in the bios at some point.

If the grub menu listed hdc as the MBR, then you either installed Fedora to the secondary master drive, or have an unusual setup for the drives.

Can you post your drives, how they are jumpered and what is installed or on each? What drive did youinstall Fedora on?

When you do the installation, you must alter where grub is installed correctly, as it assumes you are installing on a single drive in the system. I assume this is what happened to you.

See my article here which shows the advanced bootloader options and how to set them.

It looks like I need to be clearer in my previous linked pages, so I will change that section.