trouble booting FC5. Please help!

Jim Cornette fc-cornette at insight.rr.com
Wed Jul 19 21:22:11 UTC 2006


Jacob Henke wrote:
> Okay, I had installed FC5 on my harddrive using pretty much the default 
> options, then (much later) I put in a second hard-drive and decided to 
> install Windows I deleted the First small petition on the first hard 
> drive and everything else on the second and installed Windows. [For some 
> reason it didn't work, so I gave up on windows.] Thats when I realized I 
> couldn't boot Fedora anymore. I tried searching for a way to reinstall 
> GRUB (such as the rescue disk and so forth) eventually I just 
> reinstalled Fedora Core 5 on the second Hard Disk. Now I have GRUB back 
> but it only boots the second FC5 instilation. What I need is to be able 
> to boot the First instillation on the First Hard Disk. 

The best way is to use the rescue CD and it should give you a choice as 
to which installation to boot, if it sees both installations.

What you want to do so your system is easily manageable is to install 
one grub installation to the partition that has your /boot partition on. 
You can do this by booting into the system, choosing the appropriate 
version, chroot /mnt sysimage and then running grub-install for say 
/dev/hdb1 for grub to install into your second installations partition.
grub-install /dev/hdb1 for example with your secondary drive 
installation selected.

To get your first installation back, select it as a choice from the menu 
the rescue CD should detect. (or first install disc using linux rescue)
Once initiated, running chroot /mnt/sysimage and finally running:
grub-install /dev/hda to install onto the MBR. You next need to add a 
chainloader entry into grub to chainload the second drive installation 
where the grub primary stage is installed into the /boot partition.

The later stages of grub are under /boot/grub. Running grub-install 
should set things up correctly for you.

Easier done than said,

Jim

-- 
Some people live life in the fast lane.  You're in oncoming traffic.




More information about the fedora-list mailing list