> I am trying to install FC2 on a Dell Dimension 8300, with a Seagate > Model ST3120026AS SATA 120Gb hard drive.
> The controller is an Intel 82801ED Ultra ATA Storage Controller. I > have repartioned the drive with Partition Magic
> and formatted the last 20Gb as ext2. There are no errors on either > partition and the machine boots into XP normally.
> Upon starting the installation with the known geometry,
>
> boot: linux hda=14589,255,63
Why do you pass it the CHS geometry? Don't.
oops - maybe too late already :| I did miss your subject along with the boot details. But are you really hit by the dual boot problem? Do you just want to prevent? The errors in your mail seem to indicate a very different problem.
I tried an install this past weekend, and the machine gave me the same error message when I loaded the CHS geometry(I was trying to avoid the dual boot bug).
Without the CHS geometry, the install proceeds fine, but when finished, I
can't boot XP. I could boot into Fedora and into the Dell Diagnostic
Utility hidden partition. As I remember, the Dell Utility hidden partition was given as
(hd0,0). So I thought I could just modify the grub.conf file to (hd0,1),
to access the XP partition, but that file did not save correctly. So I thought
I had a bad partition table. I could not access my hard drive with the Fedora
Rescue disk and could not issue the command:
sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda
or the command fdisk -l /dev/hda
I ended up using: fdisk /mbr and that allowed me to boot back into XP. One other thing I have noticed since then, is that my Knoppix 3.6 CD can read my hard disk. The command: fdisk -l /dev/hda works and the command sfdisk -d /dev/hda also works. I don't know if I can write to it.
What a mess! I am lost.
