installing Fedora 11 on dual-boot machine changes active partition?

[Andre Robatino]

On 08/16/2009 05:00 PM, Andre Robatino wrote:
> My father has a dual-boot Vista/Fedora 11 machine, with Grub on the MBR.
>  He recently enabled recommended updates in Vista, and it wanted him to
> install SP2, but he was unable to.  At Stage 3, after rebooting, it got
> to 100% but then failed and reverted the changes.  The associated error
> number was 80004005.  We found that the source of the problem was that
> the active partition was the Fedora /boot partition, not the Windows
> one.  By using Vista's Disk Management tool to make the Vista partition
> active again, the problem was solved.  Grub doesn't seem to care which
> partition is active (at least if it's on the MBR).  Looking at old saved
> fdisk output from 2 of my machines, I suspect that F11 changed the
> active partition, and that in F10 and earlier, the Windows partition was
> active.  Is this new behavior in the F11 installer (to change the active
> partition, even though Grub doesn't care), and if so, is it deliberate?

Sorry for the very late followup, but after clean installing F12, I see
that the F12 installer has again switched the active partition from the
Windows partition (/dev/sda1) back to the Linux /boot partition
(/dev/sda2).  I'll have to switch it back again to avoid future problems
with Windows updates.

[root at compaq-pc ~]# man fdisk
Formatting page, please wait...
[root at compaq-pc ~]# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x031a25b1

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1       10444    83886080    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2   *       10444       10469      204800   83  Linux
/dev/sda3           10469       30401   160103424   8e  Linux LVM
[root at compaq-pc ~]#


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