Fedora / Windows XP GRUB Problem

Hi guys.

I've got a dual boot with XP on my main disk and a Fedora partition on my second disk. I had to reinstall XP about a week ago, which has since overwritten my GRUB settings. As my Fedora installation was Core 3, and seeing as I didn't really have any important data on it, I decided to reformat the linux partition and install Core 4.

During the Core 4 install, I checked and double checked the settings for GRUB, however my machine still boots straight to XP. I've installed Core 4 twice now (in case there was an error the first time), and I've tried re-installing GRUB using the installation ISO DVD, however I'm still getting the same problem.

Anyone got any ideas as to how I can get GRUB to load?

Cheers,

katana

Are you loading GRUB into the MBR of the first disk? I think the default for Fedora is not to use the MBR, as it's not required if Fedora is the only OS and you're installing on the primary disk...

I tried to reinstall GRUB from the boot CD (well, the setup DVD), and it said that it couldn't be installed because no kernal files were found(?). I then tried reinstalling the whole thing again (for the 3rd time), making sure that GRUB would be installed to the MBR and HDA but it's still booting straight to XP.

I found some other info through Google about installing GRUB from the command line. So, I booted up in rescue mode and typed:

Then issued the command:

The following error message was generated:


Any ideas?

Did you ever find a solution to your problem?

Thanks...

Try this chief.

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/gr ... HOWTO.html

By any chance, do you have SATA drives? If so, setup disk under rescue may not recognize it.

Your problem is likely that you have your "/boot" folder on a different disk than WinXP. From the link above provided by Daemonguy:



So you should leave a little extra room on your first hard drive when installing WinXP so you can make a partition for "/boot" there under Fedora.

Oops, forgot to update this one. Yeah, found a solution to my little problem. Had to manually install GRUB
Put Linux boot CD in, and type "linux rescue", then (at the prompt) type "GRUB". At the GRUB prompt, type:


Now, just need to get Solaris installed....

i tried downloading grub for my windows xp system so i can run linux also. when i tried opening the grub download file i used winRAR to open it but then i got a pop up saying that the archive is either in unknown format or damaged. i was wondering if there is another program i need to download to open the file. also what else i should do before i install linux.

grub is not really a program you run in winblows, it is a boot loader that tells the computer which operating system to load.



It has nothing to do with the operating system, but actually it has every to do with the operating system. How exostential.......

you don't need to manually install grub in order to get linux running. pretty much with whatever distro you choose, when you install linux it will install grub (or lilo, which does the same thing as grub) for you. so all you really need to do is decide which distro (or distros !) you would like to try out and download the iso. burn the image to a disk and reboot the computer to run the cd. if you dont have an extra hard drive for linux, or an empty partition, you'll need to create a partition for it. there are plenty of resources online which will give a much more detailed guide on installing linux.