Fedora / Windows XP GRUB Problem

[katana]

July 1st, 2005, 12:07 pm

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

July 1st, 2005, 12:11 pm

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...

[katana]

July 1st, 2005, 1:28 pm

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.

[katana]

July 1st, 2005, 1:55 pm

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

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chroot /mnt/sysimage

Then issued the command:

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grub-install /dev/hda

The following error message was generated:

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dev/hdb1 does not have any corresponding BIOS drive

Any ideas?

July 25th, 2005, 8:19 am

Did you ever find a solution to your problem?

Thanks...

[Daemonguy]

July 25th, 2005, 7:40 pm

Try this chief.

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

July 25th, 2005, 8:57 pm

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

July 26th, 2005, 12:04 am

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

Quote:

If you have multiple hard drives (disks), /boot must be on the same hard drive (probably the first hard drive) that has the Windows boot loader (NTLDR) on the MBR.

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.

[katana]

July 26th, 2005, 11:27 am

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:

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root (hd1,0)
setup (hd0)

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

January 20th, 2009, 10:56 pm

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.

January 23rd, 2009, 10:30 am

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

Quote:

The boot loader is generally invoked in one of two ways:
-BIOS passes control to an initial program loader (IPL) installed within a drive's Master Boot Record
-BIOS passes control to another boot loader, which passes control to an IPL installed within a partition's boot sector

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

January 23rd, 2009, 12:14 pm

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.