arjun1

I have first time installed the FC 5 from 5 cd sets downloaded from web and as per installation instructions from redhat site on my home PC which has XP on hda and new installed FC 5 on hdb, installation went through error free..., rebooted the PC, since hda was the default boot option, I changed the boot order in set up and set it to boot from the hdb and continued, it did go to hdb and I got text mode screen with the word GRUB folllowed by the blinking cursor, I waited for 10 mins. but no response... Being first time installer, I have no idea where to start troubleshooting, Did installation go wrong ? or Is it something else... Has anybody come across this kind of situation and what was the solution without the reinstallation ? PC is HP Vectra with PIII 930 MH, 512MB ram,had 15GB,hdb 120 GB

danleff, Thanks a lot for you time and expert advice..., I was not trying to jump ahead, may be little excited with the new installation of FC5... Allright, actually I have done this installation of FC5 on new second hard drive hdb on of PC from the office, which I use sometime to work from home, So the XP(sp2) has been installed on hda, using the XP core build software from installtion dept of my office, and also I have other work related software on hda, wanted to avoid doing anything on hda, thats why installed FC5 on hdb.I do have a copy of XP SP2 from office. If there is any easy way of making dual boot, I will give a try

Good news, that I could resove the issue, which was caused because of me, the first time installer.... I re-read the boot loader instuction part, what was happened that during the first time installation of FC 5, at the boot loader stage of installtion prcess I had selected to install the boot loader GRUB on boot partition of hdb instead of MBR of hdb, which I corrected in my second time installation and every thing went through fine, FC 5 was booted successfully... Now the FC 5 has been installed, I have a question, How to make the PC dual boot with Windows XP on hda and FC5 on hdb ? Right now, If I have to boot either of OS, ever time I have to change the BIOS boot order through F2 set up and proceed, which is of not that difficult, but If there is a simpler way of doing it, let me know...

Originally posted by danleff: Quote: Quote: I have first time installed the FC 5 from 5 cd sets downloaded from web and as per installation instructions from redhat site on my home PC which has XP on hda and new installed FC 5 on hdb, installation went through error free..., rebooted the PC, since hda was the default boot option, I changed the boot order in set up and set it to boot from the hdb and continued, Can you send me a link to the article/instructions that you used? What I want to see, is if the instructions were for installing on a second hard drive. The issue is, that the instructions probably were for installing Fedora on a system with one hard drive. If you change the boot order in the bios to reach Grub on hdb, you confuse Grub, as you changed the boot order, which changes the physical designation of the drives. The default installation options generally assume that you are installing Fedora one a single hard drive, hence, the partitioning utility default option assumes that this is the only drive in the system and makes a /boot partition. Was your XP preinstalled on the system, or did you install XP from a full XP cd disk? In other words, do you have a full copy of XP, or the recovery disks from HP only? We need to know this to decide what to do and if you can recover in case something goes wrong with the proposed fix. Good news, that I could resove the issue, which was caused because of me, the first time installer.... I re-read the boot loader instuction part, what was happened that during the first time installation of FC 5, at the boot loader stage of installtion prcess I had selected to install the boot loader GRUB on boot partition of hdb instead of MBR of hdb, which I corrected in my second time installation and every thing went through fine, FC 5 was booted successfully... Now the FC 5 has been installed, I have a question, How to make the PC dual boot with Windows XP on hda and FC5 on hdb ? Right now, If I have to boot either of OS, ever time I have to change the BIOS boot order through F2 set up and proceed, which is of not that difficult, but If there is a simpler way of doing it, let me know...

1. Did you accept the deafult options to set the partitions on the drive that you installed Fedora to? - Yes on hdb 2. Where did you tell Fedora to install the Grub bootloader to? The MBR of hda, or the boot partition of hdb? Or, did you accept the defaults. - the boot partition of hdb hdb is a new hard disk, added as slave disk, has ntfs, while installing FC 5, I removed ntfs from hdb and chose defailt partition layout for FC5 also asked to insall boot loader on hdb