I've had a similar problem. And I, too, have a dual boot system (and soon to be another one). Which partition is your active partition? You can find this out by doing a fdisk -l /dev/hda The active partition will be noted with the * next to it. If you've installed your boot loader into the /boot partition and *NOT* the MBR, then your /boot partition needs to the the active one. Usually the windows installer will make C:\ the active partition. You just need to change this. >From the Rescue CD prompt do the following: 1. fdisk /dev/hda 2. Press "a" (to change toggle active partition) 3. Press "1" (to toggle the windows partition "OFF") 4. Press "a" (again!) 5. Press "5" (to toggle the /boot partition "ON") 6. Confirm the changes have been done by pressing "p" (to print the partition table). You should have a * next to /dev/hda5 (under the "boot" column) 7. Press "w" to write the partition table, if its correct. 8. If you get an error about device being 'busy' ignore it, and reboot You should now get your bootloader on startup. If you ever re-install windows again, you will just need to re-do these steps to gain back your boot loader, because windows will re-make the C:\ drive your "active" partition. This is why I disagree with people who say there should not be an option for this when installing. If there was an option it would be easy to say "when you are setting up drives, select this optiom". Even if the option is burried under two or three menus. Anyhow I hope this helps. -----Original Message----- From: fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Reshat Sabiq Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2004 12:06 AM To: For users of Fedora Core releases Subject: Re: Invalid partition table Thanks Timothy and Matthew for your responses. Yes, this is a dual boot. This is how it's currently set up: /dev/hda1 1 1014 NTFS /dev/hda2 1015 3446 Extended /dev/hda3 3447 4661 Unused /dev/hda4 4662 4863 Unused /dev/hda5 1015 1024 /boot /dev/hda6 1025 3316 / /dev/hda7 3317 3446 swap I never heard of boot having to be a primary partition, but maybe it has to be? It's currently a logical one. I set this up using fdisk, and then went on to installing. If i try the same partitioning from the install CD, i get errors about failure to do disk-based (or cylinder based) partitioning. But once it's set up by fdisk in advance, the install CD accepts it just fine. Since it probably doesn't have much to do with LBA-32 or cylinders for /boot, i will likely try making everything folloing NTFS Unused (1 partition), and then go on to installing and see how the CD manages it. Once it's installed i could resize and re-partition the pieces i need. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks, <rsa/> Forgot to mention: Windows boots fine. Trying restore from rescue CD was unsuccessful: it reinstalled boot loader, but there's nothing about partitioning. It looks like fdisk might be accepting partitioning that is invalid. I haven't experienced invalid partitioning before, so don't know what the criteria might be. I considered myself the king of partitioning... :)
