Xp / Fedora dual booting...

[witerabit]

Okay... This has probably been answered somewhere in here before, but I've waded through 8 pages and haven't found it so far, so if anyone has the answer handy it'd save me a whole pile of trouble.

Right. So. Got a new box. Installed ME as that was all that was in the house... then installed Fedora. All fine and dandy.
Acquired a copy of XP and figured I might as well get ride of the ugly arse ME thing, so I did. After it was installed, I noticed that Xp had decided to overwrite grub. This leaves me with a nice 10 gig partition that I can't actually get at. Yay.

So... what I'd like to know is...
Either is it possible to get grub back without too much hassle (I know no longer have the install CDs and would prefer this... well. Just because...)
Or, if that is a real pain, can someone help me with the syntax of boot.ini so I can add Fedora to the Windows bootloader?

Thank ya...

[u231]

creating a boot floopy should help or i think that the fedora cd in recue mode will be able to rewrite grub and in the futer always install xp first, xp needs to be at the front of the hardrive to be read and grub will be written over by xp

[witerabit]

Thanks dude.

I actually figured that out myself after hours of trolling and the like...

Problem is, after all that, I appear to have a much more serious issue...

Fedora can nolonger find init. :P

Reinstall it is, I think.

[Nerderello]

do a search on "kernel panic" before you re-install

probable causes is that the initrd that is mentioned is either (1) mis-spelled or (2) not where you said it was or (3) corrupted.

have fun

Nerderello
ps. have you read the tutorial section about boot problems and Grub? It deals with the sort of problems you mention.

[Stormblazer]

I had a similar problem as well, where i installed xp after installing fedora.
I don't know the exact method to fix it, but i can point you in the right direction.
First, put in the Fedora boot CD/DVD.
Type linux rescue at the boot prompt
You should be able to get into GRUB from here
I think you can reinstall GRUB into the MBR (Master Boot Record) without wiping out the ability to load windows, but i'm not sure. On my system GRUB just transfers to the Windows bootloader when i select "Windows," but it may not work the same for you.
A list of GRUB commands and how to use them can be found here

[fegdemon]

i had a dual boot XP and RH9 which was working well.
all updates installed.

i installed Fedora on a separate HD single booted (wire change lol)

then i wanted to install fedora next to RH9 but made a mistake

Fedora went over RH9
but i still had my dual boot
but for some reason i had problems with the x-server
i tried to read the log file but nothing happened.
all i could do was turn fedora on or off.

so reinstalled fedora on my second disk and thus erased the update from rh9
but now windows wasn't booting anymore.
XP was on pre-installed.

fixed my mbr with getmbr
http://www.allthatcounts.com/comp/mbr.htm

now i'll fdisk my 2nd hd with fedora and try again