Dual Boot Issue

[grimm08]

I have been trying to get my custom dual boot to work on a new Fedora/Windows XP machine. This program worked on an older copy of Red Hat/Windows workstation.

So maybe somebody else might be able to help me out here. Since Windows at my department is meant to be generic, we have students login to Fedora/Red Hat and then use a program call dboot to boot into windows. For some reason dboot is not working on the new Fedora OS.

Under the hood of dboot the program modifies the active partition by using fdisk with the following commands.

a (goes into the toggle boot flag option)
1 (changes the boot flag to partition 1, windows in this case)
a (goes into the toggle boot flag option)
2 (removes the boot flag from partition 2, Fedora in this case)
w (writes the changes to the disk)
reboot (reboots the system into windows, if everything work right).

I even typed in the commands manually and still the system boots into Fedora instead of Windows, any help I would be greatfull thanks.

Grimm08

[JamesNZ]

I have never heard of dboot but if I were you I would reinstall fedora and use grub as the bootloader instead of dboot. It would just save alot of pain

[Lostfarmer]

JamesNZ is correct at useing GRUB as your duel boot menu. The way to do that depends if fedora uses grub legacy or grub2.

Grub is currently installed the the MBR, the reason changing the boot flag has no effect. If you want to go back to using dboot , you will need to install grub to fedora's root partition and use a XP cd and run 'fixmbr' from the recovery console.

[grimm08]

dboot was a program created by my department years ago, and I beleive that is causing most of the problems.

Like I said eariler Linux needs to be the defualt OS and students should only be able to get into windows by loging into linux first.

[rcgreen]

Grub is currently installed the the MBR, the reason changing the boot flag has no effect. If you want to go back to using dboot , you will need to install grub to fedora's root partition and use a XP cd and run 'fixmbr' from the recovery console.

That sounds right. Since this is a new installation of fedora,
chances are that GRUB was put into the master boot record
by default, but it needs to be in the Linux partition boot sector.
The fixmbr command will restore a generic Microsoft
type boot loader to the MBR, and it will boot whichever partition
is marked active.

[grimm08]

Sounds like a plan, Ill let you know when I get a change to try it.

[grimm08]

You were right putting grub on the linux partition solved the problem. My client are now able to boot between the OS's at planned.

Thanks very much.