lanmat

Success!! Now my computer is up and running the way I intended. Booted linux rescue, from DVD. ran /sbin/grub-install /dev/sda after reboot I was able to boot XP "out-of-the-box" So, I'm happy, but I still don't know what I did wrong before! / Mats

Thanks for your response, danleff. Quote: You must tell Fedora, during the installation, to place the grub bootloader on the MBR of the primary sata drive. I think I did, but I'm not sure. Obviously, it didn't work. Quote: To complicate matters, HP systems, especially with XP pre-installed, often have a rescue partition at the beginning of the hard drive. This is often a hidden partition, but if you make it active, Grub will try to boot from it (assuming hd0,0 is the XP drive). How can I tell if I have a hidden partition? My layout is: [root@name sbin]# ./fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 30400 244187968+ 7 HPFS/NTFS Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 14 19457 156183930 8e Linux LVM Is makeactive the way to boot XP with a hidden partition? Quote: There is also a bug in Grub that can cause this. Referring to your article: Quote: grub (hit the enter key & after each command below) grub> root (hd1,0) (since fedora /boot is on /hdb or the second hard drive) grub> setup (hd0) (the MBR of the first hard drive) grub> quit is this the way to resolve the grub bug? Quote: Now that you have changed the designation of how the drives are detected in the bios, you have two choices, try to rescue Fedora again (which may fail) or re-install Fedora the correct way. I changed it back to "AHCI" right after doing "fixmbr" and "fixboot". I don't know how this affects the system. Could it affect grub booting XP? Presumably, linux rescue will work again, as I'm really back at where I started after installing Fedora the first time. Thanks again for your reply and your nice articles (although, I already had seen them before posting to this forum). Still grateful more feedback. / Mats

You have probably heard this before, but I haven't been able to resolve it. I recently got a HP xw4300 workstation. Pentium EM64T, SATA etc. Preinstalled win XP x64. Wanted to dual boot Fedora core 5, got a new SATA drive. Did a "default" installation of fc5 on sdb. Failed to get grub going, XP booted without grub loading. So I booted linux rescue and did something like "grub-install --recheck /dev/sda". Then linux booted perfectly, but I was unable to boot XP. Tried to get grub booting XP, mostly in the grub console. Tried lots of variations on the theme: rootnoverify (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1 I always got back to grub again after a very quick flash of a black screen. Then I thougth I might have screwed the XP installation. So I wanted to do "fixmbr" and "fixboot" from XP recovery console. But then the XP recovery didn't find the sata drives, so I couldn't do anything until I found in BIOS that I could set "SATA emulation" to "separate IDE" instead of "AHCI". Then I could do "fixmbr" and "fixboot". Now I'm back at square 1, XP boots, but no bootloader to boot linux. What should I do the next time? All this has taken me a lot of time and effort. I need to get my confidence back before I try again. I'm grateful for any comments or tips. / Mats