AAK 0 Posted February 28, 2006 I am new to Linux but not Unix (Solaris). I have read a lot of discussion threads and answers posted by Danleff before installing FC4 on my dual hard disk system and still managed to mess something up, such that my Linux won't boot. Below are the details... 1. I have a Compaq Presario 6000 series. I have two drives in my system. Primary (hda - 160 GB) and a primary slave (hdb - 80 GB). 2. I have an XP home edition on my hda. I installed FC4 on the hdb. 3. During the FC4 installation, I choose to install GRUB on the MBR of hda. 4. I added my XP system as another system during the FC4 installation and instructed GRUB to make my XP boot as default. After the installation was complete, I rebooted and it booted XP without any GRUB splash screen. I realize that I have installed Norton GoBack (a system recovery software) that hooks the MBR on the primary drive partition. So I uninstalled Norton GoBack and reinstalled FC4 as above. This time, during installation of FC4, it automatically saw my XP system as "other" system. I renamed this to "XP" and made it my default boot system in the GRUB implementation. After the installation, I still do NOT get the GRUB splash screen. My boot order is - CD, Floppy and hda. My bios does NOT have option to boot from hdb (don't know why). hdb1 is my FC4 boot partition and has following entries... folder lost+found folder grub file initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img file System.map-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 file config-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 file vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 My GRUB.conf is as below ________________________ # grub.conf generated by anaconda # # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file # NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that # all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg. # root (hd1,0) # kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 # initrd /initrd-version.img #boot=/dev/hda default=1 timeout=5 splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz hiddenmenu title Fedora Core (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4) root (hd1,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet initrd /initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img title Windows XP rootnoverify (hd0,0) chainloader +1 __________________________ My device.map is as below __________________________ # this device map was generated by anaconda (fd0) /dev/fd0 (hd0) /dev/hda __________________________ Any pointers to solve my issue would be very helpful. Sorry for this long note. Thanks, AAK Share this post Link to post
danleff 0 Posted February 28, 2006 I see a couple of issues here. The information posted is very helpful. Thanks for making it easier! Let's take a look at what you have. I notice that you clicked to make XP the default bootloader. There is also no entry in the device.map file for hdb. Get back into Fedora (I assume you made a boot disk?) and make Fedora the default boot option in the grub config. menu. Try from the command line (why not?) as root user; system-config-boot If this utility was not installed during your installation, use yum to install it. yum install system-config-boot Yes, Fedora wants to be the default, not XP. You can always change this later. Look at this article as a reference. Look under the installation notes; Quote: If you are dual booting Windows and Fedora Check the "other" check box on the "Boot Loader Configuration" page. Click "edit". Type "Windows" in the "label" box and uncheck the "default boot target" check box. Click "ok". Click the "default" check box next to "Fedora Core" to make it your default boot operating system. Click "Next". Make sure that "other" is there, as your XP boot option. Make sure that grub is installed to the MBR of hda. Share this post Link to post
AAK 0 Posted February 28, 2006 I appreciate your quick reply... Just not to mess around more to begin with, I reinstalled FC4 with the suggestion given by you. Still the same problem persists. And my device.map file has same entries as before... Will system-config-boot help me change my device.map or will I have to "vi" it? "Get back into Fedora (I assume you made a boot disk?) and make Fedora the default boot option in the grub config. menu." For the above statement, I can use my FC4 installation disk 1 to boot and then go to rescue mode to execute system-config-boot, correct? Thanks again for managing us "newbies" so well... [Edited by AAK on 2006-02-28 14:51:35] Share this post Link to post
AAK 0 Posted March 1, 2006 I was SUCCESSFULLY in booting FC4!!!! Here is what I did... I used FC4 installation disk 1 and entered the rescue mode. Then I ran "grub-install /dev/hda" command. This changed the MBR on my primary disk (hda). Once I booted the GRUB splash appeared and I was able to log on to the FC4 on my hdb. For some reason, the FC4 installation never changed the master boot record on my hda. To recap what the FC4 / GRUB installtion does... 1. You tell the FC4 installation to change the MBR of the primary drive to point to your FC4 boot sector... 2. This loads the GRUB boot manager. 3. The boot manager then points to the kernel files of the respective installation selected on the splash screen whether it is on hda or hdb or any other partition. Danleff, is my recap correct? Thanks for your help again. [Edited by AAK on 2006-03-01 04:11:17] Share this post Link to post
danleff 0 Posted March 1, 2006 In a nutshell, that's it. There have been a few posts about this issue. the steps that you took were exactly what needed to be done. Nice going! The question now is, why does Fedora not do this? I think if you allow a default installation partitioning scheme, fedora makes a /boot partition on the target drive, but assumes that you have only one drive on the system, unless you specifically tell it where to put the MBR boot grub files to reference the /boot partition. If you seleced a previously partitioned drive, that had, say, an ext3 filesystem on it (using the expert mode partitioning scheme), then you would have had no problem with installing grub to hda. Interesting... Share this post Link to post
