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Hi danleff, Thanks for your willingness to help, realy appreciate your advices. Btw the pc i'm working on is: Asus s200 notebook. pentium3 mobile 800mhz 256mb ram. No floppy drive, no cd rom, only usb, lan and rj9 and firewire. Bios allow me to boot from usb cd rom, usb floppy drive, usb flash. The latest situation: After your very useful fixmbr advice, i learn about the usefulness of recovery disk. After partition magic gives me error and refuse to start up, i freak out cos there must be serious prob in my hdd so i run winxp recovery again but this time to chkdsk /r /p c: and also the d drive. There are bad sectors in c drive and it recover them after locating them. Bad sector must be due to my on/off of the asus over 200times over the past 2weeks. I usually wait for 15 sec b4 on the asus again. I must hav been too hurried some of the times. 1 task done but the strange thing is that I try to follow your advice and i re boot using the fc3 disk1 again and try to install again from scratch, not the upgrade. It prompts error messages that No partition table located and freak out and reset the aSUS. THis is not the case 2 times b4 i chkdsk c:. I've already re-install fc3 2 times but all 2 times I did not do a clean format of the linux partition. Basically, i cannot re install linux any more. If that's the case, i suspect that i have to do a thorough clean install of xp from scratch and get it to re partition my hard disk correctly. Then all my software and settings will be down the drain and i got to endure long wait of transfering data files to another network pc's harddisk and back again. If that's what it takes to safely have linux together with xp, I'll just have to do it then. I really cherish linux and the community behind it cos i get tons of help from many ppl, from advices to free cds to physical help to install linux. I dun see such a spirit in any other areas of interest. Even though I'm in singapore, I am really glad to find a willing ear and expert advice from you, whereever u r. I'm determined to get linux to work and help my friend to install linux in his 9 pc in his office. What's your opinion and advices for me?

Originally posted by danleff: Quote: If you have your Windows XP install disk, pop your Windows XP CD in your CD drive and boot off of it. You will be asked if you want to install or use the recovery console. Choose the Recovery Console option and then enter the fixboot command and hit the enter key. Once that is completed, run fixmbr and allow the changes to take place. Reboot and see if XP's bootloader allows you to boot into Windows. Yap, did that, great advice. Now my mbr is back and i boot directly in winXp pro. But i still cannot boot from the fedora core3 that i install. Any advices? Is it correct to say that perhaps fedora disk druit did not install the grub correctly that it somehow screwup mbr. Now that my mbr is back, it should be time to install grub correctly as suggest in: http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html Problem is when i run partition magic from winXp, it gives me: init failed error 117 I cannot even run partition magic. It is indeed a very tiresome installation for newbie like me.

Originally posted by WindowsDependant: Quote: I'm new to linux first off, and I have a Dell inspiron 5150 P4 2.8ghz w/512 mb RAM. Anyway, I had XP Pro installed and I decided that I wanted to try out Fedora Core 3, so i d/l the iso and burnt it correctly, I installed everything and no probs to speak of, however I couldn't get back to xp from grub boot loader, when it started windows it said "autochk file missing". So I reformatted my hd and installed just linux, no probs. Mow after a little research I think I know how to get the dual boot working, but when I rebooted from xp Pro cd it says please check your systems hardware configuration and then the screen goes blank! ( I caught something while linux was loading that said something.... "0.4% uncontigious". Now I can't get boot from XP cd, what can I do???? Hi, face the same problem. Need advice. I got a asus notebook. Just repartition it w winXp Pro from scratch a week back and clean up all data, w remaining 8gb unallocated space. Then a friend I know help me install debian in the 8gb, ending up with 356mb of swap partition and 7.6gb of linux partition for the debian os. I tried using debian but get abit technical for me. so I decided to use fedora core3. I install this noon and redo the linux partition to be: /dev/hda /dev/hda1 ...ntfs partition for winxp pro /dev/hda2 ...20gb fat32 partition for data storage /dev/hda5 ...about 20gb fat32 /dev/hda6 ...369mb new swap parti for fc3 Free ...7mb /dev/hda3 ...ext3 7774mb for fc3 os Then i follow part1 but not part2 of a help file Part1: " Boot Loader - My boot loader is Grub which is installed on the / partition, NOT the MBR. To do this, select Configure Advanced Boot Loader Options and install to First sector of boot partition. " Part2: " I use Bootpart from Windows 2000 to load Linux. An alternative to Bootpart is the NT OS Loader + Linux mini-HOWTO. I recommend this so you do not corrupt your Windows installation in a Dual-Boot environment. " I also follow " Check the "other" check box on the "boot loader configuration" page. Click "edit". Type "Windows" in the "label" box and uncheck the "default boot target" check box. Click "ok". Click the "default" check box next to "Fedora Core" to make it your default boot operating system. Click "next" " Then I choose the "everything" package and it takes 2.5hrs to install from 4 cds. Then it try to reboot and it cannot detect grub " Grub loading stage 1.5 Grub loading, please wait Error 17 " I then try to boot up using fc3 disk1 again on my usb cdrom and choose to upgrade the fc3 and ensure the grub settings are correct. When I reach this stage, it always tells me "no boot loader installed" and suggest to me to reinstall boot loader After upgrading fc3, it shows error msg "No kernel packages were installed on your system. Your boot loader configuration will not be changed" Now, i'm stuck in a pc that cannot boot from my harddisk. Unlike windowdependent, I would very much like to go back to my previous winxp pro cos there are tons of settings and software installed there although no critical data files. Please help.