Booting to Fedora Core 3

[jblose 0]

Hello all, thanks for having me! I will jump to the point here, and I can guarantee you will be seeing a lot of me. . .

 

I have an MSI k7n2 Delta-L Mobo, running with 768 MB RAM. I have a 20 GB drive (hda), and a 2GB drive (hdb). The 20GB is parttioned into two sections, hda1 15GB - NTFS (WIndows XP), hda2 5GB - ext3( by the way there is a 768MB swap chunk out of here as well). The second drive is whole hdb 2GB NTFS.

 

I loaded FC3 on the hda2 as '/' and when the Boot loader asked where to install, I refused and tried to go with a boot disk. To my surprise, the new Kernel doesdn't fit on Floppies ($@#%!)! So I reinstalled FC3 with Grub on my MBR. This resulted with Grub hanging, I believe it said "GRUB loading phase 1.5. . ." and it never went away. Knowing a little about linux, I am going to assume that this Hang-Up is from the famous "1024 cylinder plague".(This surprises me though seeing as this MoBo is only 2 years old.)

 

Alas I loaded a third time, and attempted to Install Grub in the first Sector of hda2(the linux ext3 partition) and of course it loaded straight into WinXP, because it can't see grub.

 

Is there a way to boot into FC3 without using a bootloader?? Someway to do it from install disks? Rescue disks? Make my own Boot-CD? And if so how do I get in to Linux to make and burn that CD?

 

Cheers,

JB

 

[linuxoverwindows 0]

i used to use boot floppies on one system that had a bad mbr. but if i remember right, it just had the grub bl on it. when grub loaded from the floppy, it pointed to the hda or actually root (hd0,0) and that told grub to look at the 1st hdd on the first partition. i can search for my notes if you need more help with grub as it has been a while since i used a boot floppy. maybe i should put a small howto on my site

[jim2005 0]

R u refering to a dual boot system. ie. you want to have windows (eg XP) and FC3? when pc is switched on you can choose either fedora or windows to load..

[danleff 0]

try this for now;

 

Get a freshly formatted floppy disk and have it ready toinsert into the floppy drive.

 

Boot in to rescue mode from the 1st install cd of fc3. At the boot prompt, type in;

 

linux rescue (hit the enter key)

 

When that is done, insert the floppy disk into the drive.

 

Then chroot into the mounted filesystem

 

chroot /mnt/sysimage (hit the enter key)

 

then type in

 

grub-install /dev/fd0 (hit the enter key)

 

Give that a few minutes to complete (there is a delay).

 

Take out the Fedora install cd.

 

Reboot, making sure that the bios is set to boot first from a floppy.

 

See if grub gives you the menu to boot to Fedora or Windows.

 

Then we will look more closely at the Grub file.

[jblose 0]

Yes I am refering to a Dual Boot System, and thank you daneleff! I will try that idea tonight, when I get home!

 

[jblose 0]

Danleff,

Your idea worked perfectly, after putting the GRUB on a Floppy, I was able to get into Fedora. The funny part is, the next day I went and bought a new Hard drive, so I reloaded everything again! GRUB is on the MBR and seems to be doing fine!

 

Thanks,

JB