GRUB is nowhere to be seen

[NickTheBubble]

Hi all,

Last night i installed FC2 on a PATA drive while WinXP SP2 sits on a SATA drive (no partitions here each OS is given the entire drive). I did pass the CHS parameters in order to bypass the "disk geometry problem" and continued with the rest of the installation to completion. On reboot my system boots straight into Windows and i am not given the chance to chose my prefered OS. What happened to GRUB?

I need to tell you that on the Boot Loader Configuration screen i ticked Windows as the default boot OS. Should i have ticked both OSs or should i have left both unticked? Is there any way to repair this problem?

Many thanks,

 

[drag]

Did you install the bootloader into the master boot record or in the partition?

Maybe the grub is installed on the PATA drive, but your BIOS is set to boot off of the SATA drive?

 

[NickTheBubble]

I think it is save to say that GRUB is installed on the PATA HDD but when i reset the BIOS to boot from it nothing happed!!! I haven't created a boot disk but i suppose i can go for a repair installation.

Could you please tell me what exactly do i need to do and most importantly how to tell GRUB to i nstall itself on the SATA drive?

 

[drag]

Well if you boot up with the Fedora rescue cd, it will look for a installed fedora OS.

Once it finds it it mounts it to /mnt/sysimage (along with any other partitions and the proc virtual file system and taking care of the /etc/mtab file)

chroot /mnt/sysimage

so that your using your OS on the harddrive then go thru the steps in this section this section of the gentoo installation manual. I know your working with Fedora Core 2, but they explain it a lot better then what I can do. Fedora's rescue cdrom would already have the /proc and the /mnt/mtab stuff setup, all you have to do is run the grub installer and make sure that the /boot/grub/grub.conf file is correct. Then run grub and do the setup commands.

Becarefull, that if you have a seperate /boot partition that will be "root" from grub's percpective. If you don't have a seperate boot partition, then grub's "root" is the same as your OS's "root", you have to make sure that all the filenames have /boot/ in front of them.

The trick is keeping the naming of the harddrives straight.
in LInux:
/dev/hda=primary master
/dev/hdb=primary slave
/dev/hdc=secondary master
/dev/hdd=secondary slave

then SATA drives are lettered /dev/hde and higher.

Then Grub's numbering sceme goes like this:
hd0 = first harddrive
hd1 = second harddrive
hd2 = third harddrive.
so on and so forth.

The trouble is that I don't know your specific setup.

Also installation troubles are given high priority to linux developers and such. Somebody may have a similar issue and had it fixed and can give you better/more specific advice.
I don't have any SATA drives or anything, so I don't know exactly how they fit into the overall sceme.

check out fedoraforums.org They have a specific section for installation help.

edit:

also if you get to grub, but all you get is a command line prompt (for grub) don't worry you can manually input boot commands:

For instance to boot into Windows installed on (hd1,0) (second harddrive/ first partition) you would go:

rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

It also has limited tab autocomplete/help. So if you forget something hit tab and it will either try to complete the word or tell you want entries are possible.

To boot linux on the first harddrive's first partition you would go:

/boot/kernel vmlinux-blahblahblabhbl bootoptions... root=/dev/hda1
boot

Should work, sometimes you need to specify a initrd.