danleff

Yes there is. Take a look at the Linux NTFS Project. Please, read the instructions and linlks on how to do it. Then post any problems that you may run into.

If possible, please post the contents of your /boot/grub/device.map file. What I want to see is what the assignments are for your hard drives. You have an external pci raid controller card, correct?

I did try this weekend last. The issue remains that the needed default drivers are not loaded on Fedora boot, even when I re-did my initrd file to include the needed drivers. I ended up with a kernel panic, which means, from what I saw, that the drive was not being read correctly. I would not do this on a main production system. The chance for error (not being able to boot your XP system on the thinkpad) is too high. If I find a solution, I will post it. Grub will need to reference the usb external drive and this is too dangerous to chance. I did not install to the MBR, as I did not want to chance this on my production system. Instead, I did what I do not recommend, I attempted to boot straight to the usb drive, using Grub installed on the MBR of that drive. This kept Grub off my main hard drive to test the process. I got a Grub boot screen, but a kernel panic. This means that the bios booted from the usb drive, but the drive was not read properly to load the Linux root filesystem. Until then, if anybody else has the solution, please let krispenmetsa know.

If you are used to RedHat 9, why not Fedora Core 4? This is the new version of "RedHat" so to speak and you should feel fairly comfortable with it. Realize, that redhat 9 is an older distro and does not have all the native support built-in for your new hardware. Can you burn some new disks? Fedora is available and free. If you don't have the ability to burn new disks, why not buy some inexpensive disks from a vendor, say, like Linux Central? There are several vendors out there that you can buy the disks from.

I recommend not changing anything further until we see what you have. Stop trying to change your partitions for now. Your external hard drive is not seen by Windows, as you formatted it with Linux partitions, correct? Windows does not see Linux partitions, except for the Computer Management Administrative Tools Utility. So, your drive will not be seen via My Computer. In terms of the new cd disks that you burned, did you check the integrity of the disks during the installation process? Fedora should have given you the opportunity to do this early durng the installation phase. Depending on how you downloaded the iso files, they could be corrupt. It's a good idea to check their integrity before trying an installation. Laptop cdrom drives can be funky with cdrw disks that are home burned. I have run into this before. Did you burn the disks on the same cdrw drive that you are attempting the install with? CD-R disks are often better suited for this. If you are going to install Mandriva on this system, you may need to pass a command at the initial boot menu screen for your video card. Do you know what video card is on the laptop? The best way to partition a drive for dual booting and installing Linux, is to install Windows and use PartitionMagic to resize the Windows partiton to leave some free space (as much as you need for Linux) at the end of the drive. Then you tell Mandriva's partitioning section to use the free space, during the installation. When you use PartitionMagic, use it as a tool, not as a total solution. You don't want to make multiple fat32 partitions ahead of time. You either; 1. use it to make one fat32 partition for Windows and leave free space (no partition) for Mandriva. This allows Mandriva to automatically make and set the partitions for you on the free space. or; 2. make one partition for Windows and make one linux partiton (say ext3) and one swap partition for Linux. Then you point the partition utility in Mandriva to use those partitions for your installation, using the "expert partitioning" mode of the Mandriva utility. Now you have a different problem. Drive c is now e? Did you install Windows on e or c? What is on c? Right now, I suggest that you post what your partitions are. Use PartitionMagic to post what the drive partitions are. Include what you set the partitons at. Did you make all primary partitions or a Primary and logical partition? Also post, if possible the logical order of the partitions, as seen in PartitionMagic (PM). Say; Drive c = Primary partiton = ist partition shown in PM. Drive e = logical partition = second in order. I think that you are getting way ahead of youreself with this process. Please try to avoid changing things until we see what you got right now.

Opps! I missed page 2 of this thread. But, your partition table seems corrupt. I don't know a way around this. Your problem is not the boot,ini file, but the MBR of the drive and the changes you did to the geometry. Unfortunately, one fix may not work now, but let's try it. Go into the bios and change the detection of the drive from "auto" to "LBA." See what happens on boot of either RedHat and/or Windows via Grub. I'm a little lost here, are you booting grub via a boot disk, or from the hard drive?

Redhat 9 is obsolete and does not support sata drives. Any reason why you are not trying a newer distro that would have native sata support, say Mandriva 2006 or Fedora Core 4?

Was the original windows installation a pre-loaded version of Windows, or did you install it from a full Windows XP disk. Generally, in these legacy systems (Compaq and Dell), this is a problem, as the drives are set up in a unique way in a preloaded XP installation. What is the drive jumpered at and cabled for? Primary Master, or cable select? Are you sure that you cabled the drive on the Optiplex correctly? If you can boot into RedHat, try to post the drive, as it is seen by Linux, by issuing the following command, as root user, in a console window; fdisk -l I forget, but you may have to do; /sbin/fdisk -l That's the letter small case "L", not the number 1. What does the drive show in the bios as assigned as, primary master?

Let me clarify what seems to be a confusion. Quote: There is no need to change the boot order in the bios when installing Linux. Folks sometimes think that they need to change the boot order in the bios to a second hard drive that they have in the system when installing Linux to a second hard drive. When installing Linux, Grub will assign each drive in the system and identifier. Such as; Primary master drive = hda Primary slave drive = hdb Secondary master = hdc Secondary slave - hdd Say you have two drives in your system and you install Linux on the primary slave and XP is on the primary master, both on the first partition of each drive. You want to dual boot and install Grub in the MBR of the primary master. Windows XP = Primary master, or hda Linux = Primary slave, or hdb Grub will assign the drives in the /boot/grub/device.map file; (hd0).../dev/hda (hd1).../dev/hdb Grub starts the drive assignments at zero, not 1. title kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz...... title Windows chainloader (hd0,0) +1 Where (hd0,0) is the primary master drive's first partition. Where (hd1,0) is the secondary salave drive's first partition. Depending on how you assigned partitions on your drives (primary partition vs. logical partitions), the second number may vary. In a hard drive with a combination of primary and logial partitions, primary partitions generally have lower number sequences and logial partitions are assigned higher number sequences. If you want to change the order that each OS boots by default, you change the default line in grub to tell it to boot whichever OS that you want to be the default OS to boot first; Default=0 Tells grub to boot the first entry OS in Grub, which in the above example is Linux. Default =1 tells grub to boot windows by default. There is no need to unplug drives from the system to boot a second drive in this senario. Unplugging drives or changing the boot order in the bios (which hard drive boots first) only confuses grub, which is set to boot in the order that the drives were originally set at when Linux was installed. Of course, there are complications if you make a mistake and set grub to install on the MBR of the second drive. Then Grub does not boot from hda, or the primary master. In this case, since grub is on the secondary slave drive, if you change the boot order in the bios to HDD1 rather than HDD0, grub is on the MBR of the second drive and you get the grub boot screen. This is why you need to take care and pay attention to what you tell Linux to do when installing a bootloader. All these things can be "fixed" by changing some commands in grub to reverse the drives in the system, but better to do it right first! Add raid or sata drives, or a pci raid controller card and things get a little more challenging.

Quote: Well I have to change the boot order in the bios before installing Linux. I have to set it to not boot any hard disk at all and cd only. I have to. Only way to boot of a cd. No, do not change the boot order of the hard drives! If you do this, then you change the primary hard drive boot disk order, which is not what you want to do. If the cdrom is the first boot device, what is the second? Setting the cdrom to boot first, just allows the system to boot from the cdrom first, then the (hopefully) primary master drive, which should be hdd0. If no bootable cdrom is found, the system boots off the next drive in the boot order. There should be a setting in the bios to choose what type of system you are booting, scsi vs. ide. Is there a setting right now that has this order; scsi (or raid), ide.... or; ide, scsi (raid)....

First of all, what filesystem did you use to make all your partitions? NTFS, fat32, linux partitions? What tool did you use to partition your hard drive? You have Fedora Core 4 installation disks? Do you have official disks, or did you burn them yourself from iso images? Can you give some system specifications on your system? You need to make sure that Fedora is compatible with your hardware. Giving more information would help about your system. Make and model number, how much ram is on the system and what you plan to do with linux would help. Did you consult the Official Fedora Documentaion Page to assist with the installation? I would not recommend Fedora for first time users. Giving us more information on what you are looking to do would hopefully determine if Fedora will do what you want and if your system is suited for the installation and save some potential headaches.

Take a look a this thread and see if it helps.

Some more information would help. This is an internal cdrw device? What version of Fedora are you using? Is this the version of K3b that came with Fedora, or off their website? What are you attempting to burn, an iso file? If so, are you trying to burn it as a data file or as an image file? Is the media rated for the drive in terms of speed and large enough to hold the data that you are trying to burn, say an 800 mb cd-r disk?

I bet the video drivers are depreciated for this old card in the updated kernel. Boot the original kernel and see what happens. The option to boot the older kernel should still be in grub.

OK, I just realized that I missed some information. Your /boot partition is on hda3 Your /root partiton is on hda4 So in any other case, the grub lines should look like; kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-6mdksmp root=/dev/hda4 initrd (hd0,2)/boot/initrd-2.6.11-mdksmp.img However, I still have not been able to figure out the logical volume thing on Fedora. My Fedora grub line for the kernel is; kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-1.1826.2.10_FC5 ro root=LABEL=/123 rhgb quiet So the syntax is off as well. Things have changed! Note the root=LABEL=/123....... I have to figure this out. I would reinstall Fedora with that bootloader. It should work. To complicate matters, Fedora has not been able to run for the first time, so I wonder if the root system files are all there. I found that my /dev directory is empty, so no boot, as there are no references in /dev to identify the drive partitions. The /proc directory content is also nonexistant.

Are you using the raid controller as a raid array, or just as an ide channel? Is the raid controller onboard, or a raid pci card? Is the bios set to recognize raid first (not the boot order)? If you post the make and model of motherboard that you have, this would help. You do not have a /boot partition. It looks like from your grub file, that you installed grub to the MBR of the Fedora drive, not the MBR of your primary master drive. Otherwise, you would see grub when you boot from this drive. You do not have a seperate boot parition on the Fedora drive, rather, a /boot directory within the root filesystem of Fedora? At least, that is what the Grub.conf file seems to indicate. If you have a boot partition on the Fedora drive, then you would see that when you do fdisk -l, say; hdf1....... /boot hdf2......./ When the bios is set to boot from the primary master, you have the Windows bootloader on the MBR of that drive. When you change the bios boot order of the drive to the Fedora drive, you are booting from Grub, which is on the MBR of the second drive. A common mistake, I am seeing from several recent posts, is to change the boot order in the bios, before installing Linux. The drive designations are always relative to what the boot order in the bios is set for.

I just did the same installation of Fedora Test 5 on a usb drive. Same problem. I think that I see the problem. The error loading OS message is related to the partitioning scheme and using the usb hard drive as the first boot device. If you used the default partitioning scheme, Fedora sees the usb drive in an incorrect order. I changed the boot order of the drives during the installation, to see the usb drive as the first boot device. This got me the grub screen, but a kernel panic. Your Fedora installation is on Logical Volume Management, so Grub also needs to point to the logical volumes, not the actual partition, say sdc1 and so forth. Unfortunately, I lost the article I browsed that apparently addresses this. I will post back when I find a solution. But my comment still stands. This is a technique that needs to be solved by someone that has experience with it. It is not for recommended for a default install.

This is interesting! I just tried to install Fedora Core 5 test on a USB drive, relevant to another thread. This is my first dealing with Logial Volume Management, as I always partition ahead of time and point Fedora to that partition. No LVM. When you do the default Fedora installation and let it use it's default partitioning setup, LVM is by default. I found that my SuSE Grub bootloader is refusing to see the LVM partition. If you did a default partitioning scheme, you probably have two partitions, a /boot partiton that holds the boot files, then the LVM partition. What I did find, is that the kernel line with root=/dev/000 needs to point to the actual LVM of Fedora. Did you install Fedora with the default options for partitions, or point it to a pre-formatted partition? Your kernel line in grub may also out of sync. kernel (hd0,4)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3 (hd0,4) refers to hda 5 and you root to hda3. Is this the case? Remember, (hd0,0) refers to hda1 (hd0,1) refers to hda2 (hd0,2) refers to hda3 (hd0,3) refers to hda4 ...and so on. But, I bet, if you have LVM, then the root= command needs to point to the actuall LVM, so; kernel...root=/dev/hda3 Should read; kernel... root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 or wherever the correct volume group and logical Volume is. But, that is assuming that the Fedora Grub file is being used. I would re-install Fedora and allow it's Grub to take over. It should pick up Mandrake, as well. If it does not, you can manually add the needed grub command to boot Mandrake later on, as you still have your Mandrake /boot/grub/menu.lst intact to refer to.

I'm having a little trouble understanding your post. Are you saying that you have one hard drive on the laptop, with 6 partitions and all the OS' you are referring to are on the same hard drive? Let's asssume this is the case. When you install any OS, by default, it will overwrite the MBR, unless you tell it to do otherwise. So, you installed Fedora and told grub to install to the MBR? Grub will only know about the other OS' that you installed BEFORE that Fedora installation. This is why you always install Windows before your Linux choice. Linux will automatically find the previous Windows installation and offer to dual boot. Windows will not. When you installed Windows 2003, it overwrote the MBR. So grub booting is gone. Where did you install Windows 2003? Did you allow it to take over the C partiton? I just had an interesting experience installing Fedora's new test 5. Things keep changing on the installer, so bear with me. You have two choices. First Option Boot the first Fedora installation disk and at the boot prompt for the installation add linux rescue to the command line. Hit enter. When you get a command prompt, type in; chroot /mnt/sysimage This gets you to the root of Fedora, as if you were at the command prompt within the root of Fedora. Then to recover Grub to thew MBR, type in; grub-install /dev/hda Do not type in hda1!, just hda. Make sure there is a space between grub-install and /dev/hda. The command pronpt should come back with no errors. This should get back grub, as the bootloader. This may work, or it may not, depending on your installation sequence. BUT, your last install of Windows 2003 will not be a choice at boot, because grub does not know about it, unless you installed it to where Windows Home Edition was originally, the "c" partition. Second option: Making a lot of assumptions about how you installed Fedora and your two Windows flavors, the best solution would be to re-install Fedora. This will assure that Windows is found and grub is installed correctly. Understand that you need to have a plan when installing any OS. Plan ahead of time what you want on the system, then proceed. This will avoid such problems. Ask questions if you have any doubts. BTW, I deleted your other untitled post, as it was a duplicate of this one.

Are you attempting to view encripted DVD's? See this link.

For now, try adding the following to your device.map file, by editing it; (hd1)..../dev/sda You need to do this as root user, using your favorite text editor, or via the file manager via superuser mode.

First, I assume that you checked the chipset on your card to make sure that it will work with this driver. Do you know the chipset that is on the card? Do you have the kernel sources installed? If you don't know, then you probably don't. Fedora does not come with the kernel sources installed by default. Look and see if you have a symlink on your instalation. Navigate to /usr/src...is there a linux symlink there called "linux" to the kernel sources?

OK, your /boot/grub/device.map files reveals some clues. There is no entry to identify the usb drive. When did you change the boot order in the bios to boot from the USB drive, after the installation of Linux? As I mentioned, I don't use logical volumes, so I need to do some detective work. In Grub, hd0,0 refers to the first partition on your ide (internal) drive. The second numbers start at zero, not 1. So for your USB drive; (hd1,0) should refer to the /boot partition, or partition 1 on the second drive. (hd1,1) refers to your root partition of Linux, or the second partition on that drive. But the logical volume business may complicate things. Let me investigate this. When booting from a /boot partition, that partition needs to be set active. I always set grub to my MBR, so I need to look at this further.

No, I just lost your thread in the large number recently posted. Again, I don't recommend installing Linux on an external hard drive, unless you know what you are doing. To give an example, see this thread. Read the thread and let me know if you still want to do this! Also check if your bios is able to boot from a usb drive. Do the boot order options show any entries, such as USB-HDD, USB-ZIP...? Maybe I will try this myself on my external drive for fun.

Looking over your previous posts, I may see the problem. In your Grub.conf file, there are some problems. The "Hiddenmenu" prevents the Grub menu from being visable, so comment it out. default=0 timeout=5 splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.spm.gz #hiddenmenu title Fedora Core (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4) root (hd1,1) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro default=0 timeout=5 splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.spm.gz hiddenmenu title Fedora Core (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4) default=0 timeout=5 splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.spm.gz hiddenmenu title Fedora Core (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4) root (hd1,1) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 quiet title Win XP rootnoverify (hd0,0) chainloader +1 I think that your root= command line is incorrect (see the green area abouve). Try changing it to (hd1,1). When you are in there, note what your /boot/grub/device.map file says that the drives should be and post the results.