[SOLVED] Problem dual booting windows 7 with Fedora 14

[philp]

I've had XP and older versions of Fedora successfully dual booting on my laptop, Its only got an 80Gig drive. So I thought that I would try and install Windows 7 with Fedora 14. I've tryed lots of different things, but have failed to get it working. Because I was getting no where to keep things simple I did the following:-
1) Installed windows 7, but leaving half the disk available for Fedora.
2) Installed Fedora, but let it do the grub install by default which should I assume use the mbr of the disk i.e. /dev/sda. It recognised that another operating system was present.
3) I let it finish and reboot... all I got was a flashing cursor.

I'm sure this was what I did previously (XP and Fedora4). But it does not even give me the menu.
In desparation I logged in in rescue mode.....checked my grub.conf etc...all looked sort of good.
I even tried doing grub-install /dev/sda..which was what I did in the old days after windows had over-written the mbr. Just does not work.

I think I must be wearing the disk out, because I have installed both operating systems so many times. I'm just a bit at a loss....and I may have to revert to my old XP to see how I get on with that.
Any ideas as to what I should try next??

Thanks for reading this

[Jonathan183]

can you post fdisk -l output and grub config information

[devils casper]

Could you post your machine's specs too?

[philp]

Thanks very much.

fdisk -l gives

[Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table
Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders, total 156301488 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe796889a

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2          206848    71682047    35737600    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3        71682048    72706047      512000   83  Linux
/dev/sda4        72706048   156301311    41797632    5  Extended
/dev/sda5        72708096   156301311    41796608   8e  Linux LVM

Disk /dev/dm-0: 41.8 GB, 41775267840 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5078 cylinders, total 81592320 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000


Disk /dev/dm-1: 1006 MB, 1006632960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 122 cylinders, total 1966080 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

I was a little worried about the partitiion errors above, but apparently this is something to do with the LVM??? So I assume that I can ignore them??

grub.conf gives

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd0,2)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root
#          initrd /initrd-[generic-]version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,2)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.35.6-45.fc14.i686)
        root (hd0,2)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.35.6-45.fc14.i686 ro root=/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root rd_LVM_LV=VolGroup/lv_root rd_LVM_LV=VolGroup/lv_swap rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYTABLE=uk rhgb quiet
        initrd /initramfs-2.6.35.6-45.fc14.i686.img
title Other
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1

The laptops a few years old, is single core Intel. 80 Gig disk, 500Meg Ram. Not sure what else I can tell you. Thanks again for your help.

[yancek]

I can't tell from your posts whether you have actually been able to boot Fedora or windows 7??

You might check the hardware requirements. Minimum RAM for Fedora is 384MB with 512 recommended. Windows 7 minimum RAM is 1GB. Check these sites:

1.*Welcome to Fedora 14

Windows 7 System Requirements

[philp]

Thanks yancek

Wow, I did'nt know that windows 7 needed a gig. Having said that I was running windows 7 ok on my laptop, before I put Fedora on. But to be honest I dont use windows much. I dont think my problem is becuase I only have 512MB ram. However, since that is the recommended limit maybe I should go back to XP and see if I dual boot with that. I will try this next week.

Any further comments welcomed
Thanks

[devils casper]

I would suggest you to re-install Fedora, if possible. This time use ext3 partition instead of LVM. Create one ext3 partition 10+ GB for / and 1 GB for Fedora.

[Jonathan183]

Use XP ... even if you get Windows 7 to run it is likely to run slow compared with XP on the hardware you have.

[philp]

Thanks everyone for your help and comments. I did try re-installing Fedora without LVM, but that too gave me the flashing cursor. I then installed XP followed by Fedora14 and that worked straight away. So I'm happy, I can only assume that it was Windows 7 or my hardware not up to the job? I have dual booted Windows 7 and Fedora14 on another much faster machine, but that was with two disks. However even that proved to be not straight-forward.

Anyway its great that I now have a dual boot laptop with Fedora-14

Thanks again...