DarkoD

Hi all. I also have problems booting FC3 and XP and I hope someone can give me couple of hints. I'll try to be as precise as possible, being quite new to Linux. I had a Mandrake 10 installation I played with until recently and the LILO boot loader never gave me any problems although it was my first Linux try. Since I have Athlon 64 a friend suggested for me to try FC3 64bit version and I thought why not. Did the download, burnt the CDs, run the media check at the beginning of install. 1. I have an IDE drive strictly for data at the moment. No OS, no boot loader on it, and I would like to keep it that way since I plan to remove it soon. So I want my both OS on the other drive I have, SATA Maxtor 120GB. 2. Deleted the Mandrake 10 partitions and tried installing FC3 there. Used the manual partitioning, no major issues. But could not boot to WinXP after (NTLOADER missing message). First time it was my fault, since I didn't notice that in fact I set the GRUB to load on /dev/hda (my IDE) instead of /dev/sda (my SATA which is primary boot device in BIOS too). Playing around with FIXBOOT and FIXMBR managed to mess it up completely. 3. Since all my data is on the IDE, didn't get too upset, did a re-format of the SATA, deleted all partitions, and installed a clean WinXP with 30GB NTFS system partition (/dev/sda1 later during FC3 install) and 10GB NTFS data partition (/dev/sda4 I think). 4. Started the FC3 install, 65GB ext3 partion as /, 5GB swap partition and 5GB vfat /share partition in case I want to transfer files between the OSs. 5. This time I was careful to install the GRUB on MBR of /dev/sda (my SATA drive, as I wanted). Added new entry in the boot menu named WindowsXP pointing to /dev/sda1. Is this a mistake??? Is the easiest option for a newbie to use the MBR or should be avoided? Should I just edit the "Other" entry in the boot menu FC3 install shows, or just Add new entry? 6. Should I install the GRUB on / and not on the MBR of the SATA??? I have found posts mentioning it, but I'm still confused whether during boot up it will be seen by default at all, since it's not in the MBR. I would like to avoid further complicating with boot programs under windows/dos. After all the above, FC3 loads fine, but both remaining entries in the boot list, Other and WindowsXP (created by me during install), give "NTLOADER missing" message. I haven't actualy even started working with FC3 so I would delete the partitions for it, recreate and re-install, I don't mind. But I want to do it right this time. Can you please just advise the basic, most simple options concerning the boot loader configuration and location that should be used. Thanks a lot.