Grub boot loader issues? (stupid grub!)

Hey all,

Brand new newb from XP his whole life (aside from 98, and 2k). I just installed fedora core 7 on my slave hard drive. My primary has Xp on it.

Now, when my computer goes into the boot loader, Grub installed over Window's MBR, and so here's what happens:

Grub _

And it just sits there doing nothing...

Now heres the wierd part! (for me anyways..) When I leave a bootable CD in there (such as my winXP cd) and I let it pass the part where it says "press any key to boot from Cd..." Grub loads just fine!!! I don't get it...

Can someone help me with this?

[bob]

By any chance is one of your drives SATA and the other IDE? Also wondering if your Windows boots normally or is it's bootloader also corrupted as you mention.

Ahh, well, my windows boots normally when the cd thing is in, just as Fedora will also start up correctly, but without the cd... just the:

Grub _


And both the drives are IDE. I have one sata hard drive on a pci card, however it does not share any partitions, OS's. Just data.

Oh, one other thing I thought it may have been, was the fact that fedora was installed second on the slave drive, and the boot loader was having trouble finding both fedora and windows, so I tried making my HDD boot group's slave as first boot priority, right after CD/DVD in the bios, but no luck.

[bob]

Bet that SATA drive is the one that's messing it up though. There's been numerous reports of IDE/SATA problems. How about trying this: unplug the SATA drive for the moment and then try:

1. Boot off the Fedora CD or use the Fedora Rescue CD
2. At the boot prompt type 'linux rescue'
3. The rescue mode will find the fedora installation
4. Type 'chroot /mnt/sysimage' (without quotes)
5. Type 'grub-install /dev/hda' (to install Grub to the MBR of the 1st HD)
6. Restart and you should get the boot menu

Alternate option:
1). Use the Windows Install disc to go into Repair mode and use the 'fixmbr' command to get back your Windows boot.
2). Set each drive to boot independently with two mbrs as I've mentioned in post #43 here: http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=162172

[davascript]

you will have to add this to grub.conf for your windows entry under chainloader +1

map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)