Fran Fabrizio wrote:
There's so much conflicting advice out there (put it in the MBR! Don't put it in the MBR! etc...) that after six unsuccessful tries, I'm just throwing myself at your feet and begging for mercy... :-)
Oh dear. It seems that a lot of people "know" something that simply isn't true.
1 120G SATA drive, came pre-loaded from Dell with WinXP on an NTFS partition. I used Partition Magic to setup the following partitions:
In this order on the drive...
1. Very small Dell Utility partition 2. A 200MB ext3 partition to use for /boot 3. A ~60G NTFS partition with WinXP on it 4. A ~55G ext3 partition to use for / 5. A Swap partition with the rest of the space
This is similar, but not identical to the set up I have on this machine:
1. hda1: Very small Dell Ultility partition 2. hda2: Partition for WinXP 3. hda3: /boot 4. hda4, extended partition, contains hda5 and hda6) 5. hda5, swap 6. hda6, /
I put #2 where it is because I read that the boot partition should be before the 1024th cylinder.
That's largely a restriction in old BIOSes. I frequently get the message during install about the boot partition not fitting the boot requirements and its yet to cause me problems. I believe that anything that claims any knowledge of LBA in the BIOS will be just fine. Still, someone's bound to find a modern machine for which here is a problem ... but it won't be like any of the ones I've ever had.
I then installed Fedora Core. It can't create a boot disk because it says it won't fit on a floppy. :-/
Me too. Actually, I don't have a floppy drive, but "linux rescue" from the boot CD works just fine.
In the Grub configuration, I've tried both to install it to the MBR and to the first part of the boot partition. Neither of these work - the machine still boots into WinXP directly.
If you don't put the grub boot sector in the MBR, then you'll need a different boot loader in there that knows how to chain grub. Or you can use grub. If I'm going to dual boot a machine, I install WinXP first and then Linux after. When you get to the bit about booting, it says there are two bootable partitions and offers to boot the grub boor loader in the MBR. You don't actually need to do anything other than click "next" here. I sometimes change the label from "DOS" to "WinXP" but that's about it. Honest, it really is easy, you don't need to work hard.
For what it's worth, this (roughly) is my grub.conf. I've removed one or two Linux kernels for the sake of brevity.
-----------------------------------------
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,2)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Linux 2.6.3
root (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.3 ro root=LABEL=/
initrd /initrd-2.6.3.img
title WinXP
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
title Diagnostics
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
-----------------------------------------The "WinXP" stanzas are exactly as installed by the boot process, I haven't messed with them at all, not even a little bit. If you're going to use this, you'll need to get the right kernel for Linux (unless you happen to have a 2.6.3 kernel) and you'll need to change the roots: (hd0,2) is /dev/hda3, my /boot, (hd0,1) and (hd0,0) are the Windows and Dell diagnostic partitions respectively.
Note that the WinXP boot neither knows nor cares what the file system is. All it does is chain the boot sector at the beginning of the (hd0,2) partition -- it's up to that to do the right thing.
I've never actually booted the Dell diagnostics. I ran them when I first got the machine but not since. I know that the BIOS diagnostics don't know how to boot them anymore, but I'm not greatly bothered.
If I use PartitionMagic's BootMagic utility to tell the machine to boot off of partition #2, I get the Grub menu, and Fedora boots just fine, but WinXP errors during boot.
I've got bootmagic, but since grub seems to do everything I could possibly want (I've got one machine that boots RH9, a self-compiled RHEL3 and two different Win2k installations) I've never felt the need. I'd go back to grub -- the documentation under "info grub" is comprehensive and I worked out how to do the multi-Win2k boot from it so it can't be that bad.
If you want to go back to grub -- and I would recommend it -- it's quite straightforward. First make sure your device map (/boot/grub/device.map) is what you expect. Mine is
(fd0) /dev/fd0 (hd0) /dev/hda
and this is pretty standard. Next boot rescue mode from the install CD by typing "linux rescue" at the boot prompt. It goes through some keyboard and language stuff and then looks for Linux installations. All being well, you can get your partitions mounted read-write. It says on the screen what you need to do next -- you need to type "chroot /mnt/sysimage" which wlll give you all your files under a root (so /boot/grub/grub.conf) will refer to the one you've been looking at recently, rather than something that belongs in the rescue environment. If you don't know about it, chroot, and the underlying system call, are quite cool.
Anyway, all you have to type is
chroot /mnt/sysimage /sbin/grub-install '(hd0') reboot
Remember to take the CD out of the drive. That's really all there is to it.
You can keep your paritions as they are, you don't need to change them. If this all goes pear-shaped you can re-install Fedora and choose the default options for booting and just stop worrying about it :-)
If I then use BootMagic to reset the boot partition to #3, WinXP works again, but the machine boots directly to it.
So my questions are now:
1. Do I have the partition table correct?
2. Where should I install the boot partition?
3. Do I have to start the Fedora install over yet again, or can I just reset the bootloader settings to the right stuff?
4. What's the proper sequence from the start so that I can do this correctly on the first try next time?
If you've done it before, I'm not sure why you're having such difficulties. Perhaps you're trying too hard :-)
jch
