Problem in booting new installation of Fedora Core 4
Tony Nelson
tonynelson at georgeanelson.com
Sun Nov 6 22:43:33 UTC 2005
At 3:04 AM +0500 11/7/05, Enlightened Moderation wrote:
>On 11/6/05, Tony Nelson <tonynelson at georgeanelson.com> wrote:
>>
>>At 12:14 PM +0500 11/6/05, Enlightened Moderation wrote:
>>>I did a new installation of Fedora Core 4 on a system with 2 hard drives
>>>and which already had Windows XP installed. The configuration before
>>>installing Fedora Core 4 was as following:
>>>hda 20 GB has two ntfs partitions with windows xp installed in the first
>>>bootable partition. hdb 40 GB had only one 20 GB bootable fat32 partition.
>>>Rest of space i.e. 20 GB was set aside free for Fedora Core 4.
>>>
>>>I allowed Fedora to do automatic partition in the free
>>>space reserved.Also, I allowed to automatically select the place to
>>>install grub ( I did not opt for advance grub options).
>>>
>>>The installation proceeded normal until it congratulated me for completing
>>>the installation and to reboot the system. When I did a reboot, however, I
>>>did not get any grub boot loader prompt, and instead booted straight into
>>>Windows XP like before.
>>>
>>>I figured out that Fedora did not install the boot loader in the MBR of
>>>the first drive and instead installed in the first sector of /boot in the
>>>second drive. Therefore, I made my BIOS to boot from the second drive
>>>(hdb). However, I get a prompt telling me "Missing operating system".
>>
>>The BIOS change may have renumbered the drives so grub was confused.
>>
>>
>>>Please let me know how can I correct this to have a dual boot system with
>>>windows XP and Fedora Core 4.
>>
>>You can set up your boot.ini file to chain to grub if you want. You need
>>to copy the grub bootsector from the linux partition (or wherever it was
>>put) into a file on your boot drive and add a line to boot.ini.
>>
>>I used the rescue CD to copy the bootsector, mounting a floppy and then
>>using dd to copy the bootsector to a file on the floppy. I just stumbled
>>through the process, probably using man a lot. I then rebooted into
>>MSWindows and copied that file onto my C: drive as C:\linux.bin, and added
>>a line to boot.ini, something like:
>>
>>C:\linux.bin="FC3"
>>
>>In my case, I also had some trouble booting MSWindows, as I had Extended
>>Partitions that got renumbered when I added Basic Partitions. I don't
>>think you will have that problem.
>
>I have tried to follow the above advice but in vain. I don't know what I am
>missing. This is what I did:
>
>Booted from first cd with linux rescue
>
>mounted my fat32 partition as /mnt/hdd
>
>dd if=/dev/hdb2 of=/mnt/hdd/linux.bin bs=512 count=1
>
>Then booted into windows xp
>
>copied the linux.bin file to c drive as c:\linux.bin
>
>edited boot.ini to have a new line at the end
>
>c:\linux.bin="Fedora Core 4"
>
>Rebooted the system and selected to boot from Fedora Core 4.
>
>But still I cannot boot. The display screen just goes blank with cursor
>blinking at the top left corner.
>
>Please note that fdisk -l showd that hdb2 was 102 Kbytes
Probably 102 MB.
>and was set for boot. Therefore I copied the first sector from hdb2 to
>linux.bin. When it did not work, I tried the same thing copying first
>sector from hdb1, but again without any gain.
Well, I'd say that hdb2 was the right one. I don't know what is wrong, but
I'd guess that the grub install isn't quite right. I'd try the rescue CD
and re-install grub onto hdb2 and recopy the boot sector as before. If
that doesn't work I'd have to ask for help myself.
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:' <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
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