Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

I have read several (numerous really) threads but none of them help me. My computer has two huge hard drives. I have Windows XP on the master drive and I want to install fedora 5 on the slave. During the fedora installation there is a window that says grub will be installed in /hda, fedora on /hdb and xp on /hda. Everything seems to install ok, but when I reboot my computer I do not get the boot loader prompt that asks which os I want to boot -- instead the computer boots directly into XP. I tried changing CMOS boot setup to boot from the slave drive instead of the master drive, but after rebooting the computer could not boot at all, so I had to change it back.

Is it really possible to duel boot fedora 5 and XP? Anyone have similar experience?

Thanks

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Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

Update: I discovered how to boot Fedora by setting up the CMOS to boot from the slave driver and then install Fedora on that drive. The computer now boots on the slave drive and displays the grub menu. When Fedora os is selected the computer boots as expected. But when Windows XP os is selected the computer will not boot.

Member Avatar for John A

Fedora was probably just being stupid when it installed GRUB.

Normally, GRUB should be installed to the Master Boot Record of the first bootable hard drive, which in your case is /dev/hda. Sometimes, things get wonky, and in your case, I suspect Fedora was installing GRUB to the first partition on the hard drive. This won't work of course, because Windows is on the first partition, but it did work when installed on the first partition on the slave hard drive.

I was about to explain last night (in my timezone) how to manually install GRUB to the MBR, but I got so sleepy I couldn't finish it...

Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

I discovered the problem -- there were a couple lines missing in the Windows XP section of grub.conf file.

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