Fedora Boot Problem

[dechah]

I would like some help if possible to get my Fedora installation up and running

I am running an ASUS P4C800 Deluxe mobo with an Intel 2.8GHz C processor and 1 GB of DDR 400 Ram. My system has a 120GB Seagate SATA HDD that is the primary boot disc and contains my Windows XP installation. In addition, I have a second Seagate SATA 160GB drive that is just used as a data store. Finally there is a 80GB IDE ATA 100 Western Digital drive. Note the two SATA HDDs are not connected in any RAID configuration.

The 120GB SATA drive is partitioned into two primary parts. 10GB for Windows XP and the remainder of the disk for storage. Both formatted in NTFS

The 160GB SATA drive has a single primary NTFS partition that is simply used for storage.

The 80GB IDE disc is partitioned into 4 parts. The first part of the HDD is primary NTFS and is about 40GB in size. In addition, there is a 2GB primary partition that is formatted as a swap partition. There is also a logical extension that contains two logical extensions, the first contains Fedora and the second is a small 1GB Fat32 partition to permit the transfer of files from Fedora to WinXP and back again.

During the installation of Fedora Core I firstly got this warning:

“Unable to align partition properly. This probably means that another partitioning tool generated incorrect partition table, because it did not have the correct BIOS geometry.”

“It is safe to ignore, but may cause (fixable) problems with some boot loaders.”

I used Partition Magic 8.0 to create the partitions on the 80GB IDE disk.

Further into the installation I got the following warning message:

“Boot partition “/” may not meet booting constraints for your architecture. Creation of a boot disk is highly encouraged.”

Finally, when I am presented with the option to create a boot disc, it won’t let me, telling me that the kernel is too big to fit onto a floppy.

Now when I reboot the system, I do not see GRUB at all, the system just boots normally into Windows XP as if Fedora was not even there. The rescue system sees my existing Fedora installation and mounts is as /mnt/sysimage

I used the Fedora disc 1 and entered the rescue bootup and CHROOTed into /mnt/sysimage I can then change directory into /BOOT, and I see /BOOT/GRUB. Grub is there as well as grub.conf, so I assume that GRUB is installed, but I can’t understand why it doesn’t appear at the boot time.
So I would like to know what I need to do to either get grub to work, or to find some other way to boot into Fedora.

Any advice about getting this system to boot would be greatly appreciated.

[Prometheus]

Did you install Fedora on an NTFS partition? If so, that may be the problem. I had to take my NTFS partition and completely wipe it and allow Fedora to format it how it wanted.
Also, did you install Fedora on one of the SATA drives or on the IDE? I dont know if Fedora fully supports SATA, ive never tried, so i dont know.

If you dont have anything in Fedora that you made or saved (it doesnt sound like it) i would just f-disc the partition through xp or with a boot disc, then reinstall Fedora on the IDE hdd. Also check you bios just for fun and make sure it has the hdd you installed Fedora on as second on the Boot order. Hope it helps and good luck.

Prometheus

[Prometheus]

By second in the boot order, i meant second hdd, after floppy and maybe cd if you have that suck in there. Just make sure its after hdd0, which is your primary boot hdd. Sorry for if there was any confusion

[zen.coder]

I have a related problem, I believe.

I have a Dell Inspiron 2650 P4M 1.2/1.8Ghz with a 40GB hdd. It has the Dell EISA (?) 30MB partition first, then I have about 32GB formatted NTFS with XP Pro installed. Finally, I have two more primary partitions formatted as ext3 and linux-swap.

I installed Fedora Core 2 as a Personal Desktop and customized it somewhat, but not much. I chose Advanced options for the boot loader and told it to not write over the MBR, but rather put it at the beggining of the Fedora partition.

I was a bit surprised when it never asked me if I wanted to create a boot floppy. Of course I couldn't boot right to Fedora after this, and had to use CD#1 to recovery boot, it mounts my system drive at /mnt/sysimage.

I created a binary file with dd of the first 512bytes of /dev/hda3 which *should* be the boot loader. I copied the binary to windows and properly pointed to it in boot.ini so the Windows boot loader would prompt me for XP or Fedora.

Now, when I choose Fedora I get the blinking cursor in the top left corner and a Dell paperweight. No activity, no loading.

For a reference on how I made the binary, check the bottom part of this page: http://jaeger.morpheus.net/linux/ntldr.php
*please note I've used this method SEVERAL times on various different machines and configurations, and it always works nicely...with Red Hat 8 and 9. This is my first time doing dual boot with Fedora, so I wonder if something is different...

Any input would be appreciated.

[Prometheus]

FC2 wont ask to create a boot floppy because the kernel is too big to fit on a floppy. In place of a boot floppy they have a custom "rescue cd" now that has the kernel on it and acts as a boot drive but on a cd. Basically, it performs the same function, but on a cd instead of floppy. As for the errrors, i still dont know. I had a similar one, and it never did get straightened out. I ended up having to reformat everything because the file systems ended up getting corrupted.