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Thread ID: 45650 2004-05-29 11:51:00 GRUB won't boot to Windows dudess_on_a_mish (4468) Press F1
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240284 2004-05-30 11:56:00 I'm not sure about booting Windows 9x from GRUB, but to boot XP, I am adamant that GRUB must be on the same harddisk as the XP installation, so presumably this would apply for NT/2000 as well. Anyone can correct me if they know better, but I went through a number of GRUB entries to try and boot XP more than a few times - and none of them worked when GRUB was not on the same harddrive as XP.

Dudess, if you have Windows XP (or NT or 2000), you'll need to run the installation process of Fedora and choose to install the boot loader in the MBR of hda. I'm not sure if this would be plain old /dev/hda, but it could be listed as /dev/discs/disc0/disc. This may or may not actually mean a full reinstall of Fedora - I'm not sure about Fedora, but with the distro I've tried, you can skip right to the boot loader stage.

Your grub.conf file (or similar, naming may vary) will need to be updated - since the bootloader is running off hda, it will now detect this as hd0, and your second harddrive as hd1 - it should be a simple matter of switching these around.
agent (30)
240285 2004-05-30 12:04:00 Looking at your original posting, it would appear that GRUB is already installed on the first harddrive - it references to the Windows partition as (hd0,0).

If it's not, then I don't know how you can even boot Fedora correctly.

You could try adding the line:
makeactive

between rootnoverify (hd0,0) and chainloader +1.

Another thing to check out is whether the partition that Windows is installed on is marked bootable, which can be done via the partitioning program in some Linux installations. Again, since I don't use Fedora, I'm not sure if it's partitioner can do this.
agent (30)
240286 2004-05-31 11:23:00 Information update! ... might be a bit late now though.

There is apparently a bug with dual booting Windows XP and Fedora Core 2 that has been discovered. The hard disk geometry in the partition tables are incorrectly reported which results in XP being non-bootable. I think this is what has happened to you.

This will happen again if you reinstall Fedora, but there is a work-around for this issue.

More information here and work-around (lwn.net)

Additional information from the fedora-test-list (www.redhat.com)

Bit of a major oopsie.
Jen C (20)
240287 2004-06-05 15:01:00 Firstly, I havn't had much luck with "Grub" but found "Lilo" to be trouble free.
Place the loader on the linux partition, and use a 3rd party boot manager, I use "Boot Magic" to handle it.
Mzee (158)
240288 2004-06-05 21:15:00 Really?

Ive never been able to get Lilo to do what I want.
Grub works fine every time for me (Bar when myself and Cyberchuck attempted to replace Lilo on Slackware - That was interesting).

Ive used Xosl and that was good for booting Windows, but I didnt really have enough time back when I trialled it to really play around. Personally I'd still rather Grub over xosl :-)

..Just my two cents worth
Chilling_Silence (9)
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