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How do i Dual Boot Fedora Core 3 / Windows XP Professional ?

P

phpdog

Senior member
I am trying to get my Windows XP installation to be recodnised by Fedora Core 3 .

No matter what i do i cant get anything , i dont see Windows XP because its not there at boot screen .

I can see the NTFS partion when im installing but after that i can see nuthing , not even when im in Fedora .

Is this because Fedora cant REad/Write NTFS partions ?

Do i have to change the Windows partion to FAT32 or something like VFAT i think the Fedora website said .

Any help with this would be great

Thank You
 
No, I doesn't have anything to do with your file system.

All grub is suppose to do with Windows is activate the second stage of the Windows bootup stuff so that you can boot up normally using Windows stuff.

The install should of recognized the Windows partition and setup for you to boot for you, but I guess it didn't work out for you. All you need to do now to fix this is add a few lines of text to a configuration file.

Oh, and grub has a primitive built-in command line in itself that you can use to input lines in manually in case the changes make your system unbootable. But the safe thing to do is make a copy of your configuration file and put it in a safe place before you go around editing files.

The files in question is the /boot/grub/grub.conf file (/etc/grub.conf is a symbolic link to that). What you add depends on your harddrive arangement. Grub starts counting at 0, not 1, so that the first number is 0 and the second number is 1 and the third number is 2 and so and so forth.

So normally you install Windows on the first partition on the first drive, so I'll assume that for now.

Try adding these 3 lines to your boot configuration:
title Windows boot
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

(if you have windows on the second harddrive it maybe (hd1,0) or if you have it on the first harddrive and the third partition it may be (hd0,3), so you get the idea.)

Just add them to the end of the file and then reboot, the file is read by grub each time you boot up. If the lines are already their, then it could be that the bootloader is just going to fast and automaticly booting into Linux before you get a chance to hit enter or whatever. Some LCD displays have some problems switching resolutions fast, I noticed. Then just add a # before the "hiddenmenu" option to comment it out and make the timeout= number a bit bigger.

Hope that helps.

edit:

At boot time you can access the command line parameters by hitting 'c' button I think, it's one of those. And if you want to input the command manually it would be:
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
boot

And that should do it, I beleive.
 
Hi ,

Thanks for all the help , I managed to get it to work , but i done it after i fomatted my whole drive , then relized it must be something to do with GRUB .

Because i downloaded a program called osl200 Boot Manager [ I dont have a FDD to use Gag ] and it gave me a choice to boot to Linux or Windows straight away , not a problem 1st time 🙂

So i dunno , Im running Fedora Core 3 64bit on AMD64 3200+ S939 mabye i set it up wrong [Proberly] or theres a problem with Core 3 and GRUB .

Anyway , i got it .

By the way , so see if you have a really big HDD with a bootloader like this could you install SuSE , Fedora , Windows all on the same 160Gb HDD but on different partions ?
 
I don't know anything about osl200 Boot Manager or Gag, but I know with grub that is certainly possible.

More then just windows + Linux, you could do windows + linux +freebsd for instance. Or windows + linux + freebsd + darwin + FreeDOS, even. But stuff like that you'll have to figure out the boot arguements yourself and such. Fedora attempts to automate dual booting between Windows and Linux, but it doesn't always work, which you've seen. But you can make it work if you feel like it, whatever is the easiest for you.

i think thought that one version of Linux is enough.. There realy aren't that much significant difference between Linux versions to more then one installed, but if you think that will help you it's certainly possible.
 
Don't know much about linux (had driver issues with each distro I've tried) but with my Mandrake experiments, grub worked, lilo didn't. With my Fedora experiments, lilo worked, grub didn't.

Just putting it out there for discussion, 'cause analysis is beyond my abilities.
 
Cheers for the info 🙂

drag: thats a great link in your sig "Linux Documentation Project Guides" very helpful , ive been looking for a site like that basically like a big book of everything you need to know about Linux , Great 🙂
 
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