Dual Boot FC4 and WinXP, but KEEP my Windows MBR

[lvglen 0]

I've been reading all the posts about setting up a dual-boot system, but they all seem to have a common thread. Namely, write over your Windows MBR with the GRUB loader. The problem is, I DON'T WANT TO DO THAT! It's such a PITA if I want to uninstall Linux to rewrite the MBR in WinXP with SATA drives. I've got a WinXP system, with a pair of SATA drives. SATA1 is my WinXP boot drive and I'm setting up SATA2 as my FC4 drive. I tell GRUB to load in the first partition of the SATA2 drive (I think it's sdb1?), then reboot. I've followed all the advice about putting the Linux boot sector on a floppy, copying that to my C: drive in WinXP, and changing the boot.ini file to add the new FC4 boot file, but still, when I try to boot into FC4, I just get a BOOT: prompt and my system can't find the FC4 partition. HELP! What am I doing wrong? Any suggestions or advice?

 

Also, another question... my motherboard has a built-in sound card, but I don't use it. I've got a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card in my machine, but on a previous install that did work (I overwrote the WinXP MBR, that's why I know how much of a PITA it is to fix the MBR with a SATA drive) FC4 only saw the motherboard's sound card and not the Turtle Beach card. Any advice on how to get it to recognize the other card?

 

Thanks for all your help in advance,

LVGlen

 

[danleff 0]

Can you post a link to the directions that you used to add the grub settings to the boot.ini file? Was this for IDE or sata drives, which are different.

 

On the sound card. If you want to use a PCI sound card, you need to disable legacy (onboard) sound in the bios. Otherwise, Fedora will try to default to the onboard sound and usually miss the PCI card.

 

What motherboard are you using?

[lvglen 0]

I finally did it! I got FC4 loaded and booting up, using the Windows boot loader. I think I was doing something wrong when copying the boot sector from Linux to Windows, but it's working fine now. I'll put step by steps in tonight when I have more time.

 

Still have the sound card issue, but I think you nailed it about having to disable the m/b sound in the bios. I'll do that and report back this evening.

 

Glen in Vegas