Les Mikesell wrote:
On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 14:28, Mike McCarty wrote:
But we are talking about fedora here. If you need a 100%
guarantee, you are in the wrong place. I suppose you can
ask for your money back.
I don't see the connection between "this is Fedora" and
"I don't mind giving bad advice about the OS 5% of the time".
Fedora is always new enough that it won't be well tested
across a lot of equipment. Regardless of your advice it
won't always be right and advice based on working around
old bugs will almost always be bad even if it still happens
to work.
I'll grant you that, yes. But I don't like the idea of
giving advice which I know in advance will be bad for
some existing hardware for all releases, which is the
situation here.
I've encountered this "Oh, you're doing something wrong" attitude
before in this forum, when an install doesn't work.
And? You don't think having a box that re-writes your
boot sector when you don't want that is something wrong?
It doesn't re-write my boot sector without my permission.
But it won't boot WinXP without it.
Perhaps I misunderstood - or someone else said their machine
tried to recover automatically. Are you saying that you
can't chain-load an otherwise working Windows boot from
grub? That's pretty strange.
There are two very similar situations which have been
described, and perhaps I conflated them somewhat. I have
an HP/Compaq with the autorecovery BIOS.
If I install GRUB as the boot manager in the MBR, then my
machine complains that it has been clobbered, and asks
me whether I'd like to recover. If I tell it "no",
then it shuts up, and I can load GRUB. No problem. But
GRUB cannot properly chain load WinXP. And that's a fact.
I put the chain load stuff in for GRUB, and it didn't work.
No way, no how. After I selected WinXP, I saw it go through a
somewhat prolonged load (several seconds) with a little sort
of thermometer on the bottom of the screen (like during the
initial first boot) and then it told me that the system looked
corrupt, and did I want to do recovery. When I told it "no", it
rebooted, and up came GRUB.
This is somewhat different from the guy with the Gateway.
he apparently can't get his machine just to agree to load
up GRUB from the MBR. I could, but then couldn't boot
WinXP. Letting WinXP boot manager come up and chain load
GRUB works like a champ on my machine. And the WinXP boot
manager isn't a bad tool.
[snip]
I though you were telling people who hadn't encountered it
and weren't all that likely to.
It isn't a matter of likely to or unlikely to. There is
no chance involved in it at all. Either the problem will
appear or it will not. If it appears, it will be consistent
and repeatable. It is a matter of BIOS incompatibility, which
should be recognized and documented. For purposes of
dual-boot, it is also a matter of incompatibility with
certain OEM versions of WinXP, similar to the incompatibility
with WinNT, which also could not be loaded by GRUB.
I have, on this forum, been told repeatedly over the last
year and a half, that the situation is not as I described.
I've been told that it is "imagination", I've been told
that the installer "just works", I've been told that
it's a result of a clobbered PT (which it isn't), I've
been told that I was "inventing" it, and I've been told that
I didn't run the installer correctly. I've been told
other things.
Mike
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