Dual boot problem of FC6 and XP Pro

[jerry2007 0]

I'm new to Linux world. I have 1 hard Maxtor 190 G drive. I have Win XP Pro on NTFS partition 1 (140 G). I installed FC 6 into the rest space on that drive. I chose XP Pro Fedora as the default boot. I made sure that grub was installed onto /dev/hda. When I boot up, it did not show the grub menu.

 

I then started FC rescue mode and run grub-install --recheck /dev/hda. It finished without any errors.

 

After restarting, it showed some information like below:

 

Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM

GRUB Loading stege 1.5.

GRUB Loading, please wait...

 

Error 17

 

Can anyone shed some lights on what's going on?

 

Thanks,

 

Jerry

[danleff 0]

First, let's see what you did so far.

 

Is this a self built system, or is it one that came pre-installed with Windows? Is it a Dell, Gateway, or Compaq system?

 

These systems sometimes have a hidden recovery partition that you need to deal with.

 

Was the space on the hard drive left for Fedora just empty, unformatted space, or did you use some partitioning software to pre-format the drive?

 

Error 17 means that Fedora sees the partiton, but can't recognise it as a valid partition. This is why I ask the above.

 

When you got to the Fedora partitioning section, what method did you use to partition the drive for Fedora? There are several. What you chose depends on if you prepared the hard drive ahead of time or not.

 

Quote:

I chose XP Pro Fedora as the default boot. I made sure that grub was installed onto /dev/hda. When I boot up, it did not show the grub menu.

 

So, which is it? XP first and Fedora second?

 

When you did not get the Grub boot screen, this means that the Grub bootloader was not installed on the Master Boot Record of the hard drive. Are you sure that you did this, or did you use the option to install grub on the first Linux partition (boot directory)?

 

When you did the grub-install --recheck command, were you chrooted into the Fedora directory? You should have seen a screen that gave you the option to do so and received a command prompt with no error messages, such as the total installation not being able to be mounted correctly.

 

If you don't understand the last phrase, that's OK. Folks get frustrated when I ask to many questions. However, based on this being your first Linux experience, I need to know exactly what you did and what you understand about the process.