GiB 0 Posted February 10, 2005 Hey everybody. I'm a first time linux user trying to setup a dual boot system between XP Pro and FC3. I originally had XP Pro installed on my main drive (C:), i have a slave on that ide chain, and then I just installed an older 20gb drive I had laying around so I could put FC3 on it (all are ATA interfaces). I installed FC3 off the iso-dvd i made and now i get "GRUB Hard Disk Error" when I try and boot. I tried the XP recovery, but i get an uber-blue screen of death that tells me windows won't load for safety reasons. I've reinstalled FC3, and thus also GRUB, twice now and I can't get it working properly. One wierd thing, the bios doesn't recognize my 3rd hard drive. Windows found it fine before i installed FC3 on it. Lastly, I tried using a bootable version of partition magic to restore the MBR, but when the software loads up it says the hard drive couldn't be found and the software closes to a dos prompt that says "R:/". I completely lost on what my next step is and I'm hoping that its not reformatting my drives. I've got a lot of info stored on my C: drive I'd like to recover. Any ideas? Thanks for any help, ryan Share this post Link to post
danleff 0 Posted February 10, 2005 Quote: Hey everybody. I'm a first time linux user trying to setup a dual boot system between XP Pro and FC3. I originally had XP Pro installed on my main drive Is XP still the primary master drive? You did not change the drive designations or jumpers, did you? Just to clarify, currently, are you able to boot to either Windows and/or Fedora? If you can boot to Fedora, post the grub.conf file as it currently stands. Windows will not see the Fedora drive, beacause it is a linux partition. Windows refuses to see Linux partitions. So you will not be able to see the Fedora partition from within Windows as a normal partition or drive. Share this post Link to post
GiB 0 Posted February 11, 2005 Sorry for any confusion... Originally posted by danleff: Quote: Is XP still the primary master drive? You did not change the drive designations or jumpers, did you? Yes, XP is on hda, hdb is just a storage drive, and hdg is the drive I installed linux on. All jumpers are set correctly and i didn't change any drive configurations. Quote: Just to clarify, currently, are you able to boot to either Windows and/or Fedora? If you can boot to Fedora, post the grub.conf file as it currently stands. I can't boot into either, although i think i could boot into linux with a bit of work. I'll work on it tonight and see if i can post the grub.conf file. Quote: Windows will not see the Fedora drive, beacause it is a linux partition. Windows refuses to see Linux partitions. So you will not be able to see the Fedora partition from within Windows as a normal partition or drive. It's the BIOS that won't recognize hdg. I can't even boot into windows. *sigh* Share this post Link to post
danleff 0 Posted February 11, 2005 Ok, thanks for the clarification. In terms of the hdg drive. the bios does not give a message that the drive is found during boot, or in the bios setup? Bear with me. Is this a Compaq, Gateway or Dell system? When you disconnect the hdg drive completely from the system, what is the result? If the bios does not recognize the drive at all in setup or the boot messages, suspect a hard drive issue, such as a badly corrupted drive, improperly set jumper, faulty drive or poor connection. Check all these things out. Make sure that the connections to the hdg drive are solid and correct. Is the hdg drive set as slave, or cable select? I assume the setup or jumpered something like; hda = primary master (XP drive) hdb = primary slave (data) hdg = Is this secondary slave or cable select? (Linux) How are the cdrom drive(s) designated per the jumpers? Let us know exactly what you have. Share this post Link to post
GiB 0 Posted February 11, 2005 You sir, are a gentelman and a scholar! I went back over my setup and i found out it was a hardware/operator error. Although i thought i had the jumpers set correctly, they were not. My hdg drive was for some reason set as primary. Doh! So i changed it over to slave and it fired right up. Quote: Bear with me. Is this a Compaq, Gateway or Dell system? LOL. Its actually a system i built. P4 w/ht, 1 gb of ddr2, 340 gb of hard drive space, and a geforce 6600gt OC video card. Thanks a million for the troubleshooting help! Hopefully the rest of my linux experience will be relatively trouble free. Share this post Link to post
danleff 0 Posted February 12, 2005 Whew! (wipes his brow)... This was easier than I thought. I can't tell you how many times I missed something like this on my installs. Make sure you write down the drives and their configurations and place it in a safe place. Nice troubleshooting! But... (signature) Share this post Link to post
bb2222 0 Posted August 15, 2005 okay! you can use the most powerful GRUB FOR DOS: http://freshmeat.net/projects/grub4dos/ This is the summary: GRUB for DOS is a build of the GNU GRUB boot manager for DOS, and can be run under real mode DOS. It also has many new features. For example, it can be booted through BOOT.INI of Windows (grldr) and kexec of Linux (grub4lin). The disk emulation feature is another enhancement over GNU GRUB, and can be used to run legacy DOS/Windows9x systems with floppy or hard disk images. Share this post Link to post
