Dual Booting Windows XP And Fedora Solution

[harley51]

Fedora Core 4 Install

This by all means may not work for everybody.

I run an Intel D865perl motherboard with 2.6 gig Intel processor with 1 gig of ram. Two 250 gig
hard drives. The first hard drive is for Windows XP. Second hard drive is for Fedora and data
backups.

Drive 2 the first 40 gig is Fedora and the second 210 gig is for files backups and Norton ghost 2003
images. Which I never doing anything without a current image file it will save your butt.

Install Fedora Core 4 on the second hard drive and use the automatic partitioning tool but don't
put grub on your Master MBR put it on the first sector on your second drive. When you get to the
Boot Loader Configuration screen make sure you check the Configure advanced boot loader
options. The next screen will give the option where to put Grub Boot Loader. It should say like
hda or hdb. Hda is usually your XP Drive. From their finish loading. Put it on hdb.

Now duel booting using XP boot manager (My Preference. I don't like third party boot managers.)

Use your rescue CD to boot to Fedora.
Hit enter at the boot prompt.
Hit enter for English
Hit enter for us
Setup network select no
At the rescue screen select continue
At the next rescue screen hit enter
Now you have a prompt sh-3.00#
At the prompt type in chroot /mnt/sysimage
If hdb2 is Not your boot partition, change it as appropriate. Type: df then determine which hda#
Run the command dd if=/dev/hdb2 of=boot.lnx bs=512 count=1
You should see
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
Type ls and you should see a file named boot.lnx
Put a blank floppy disk in your a: drive
Type mcopy boot.lnx a:
It should have copied the file to your a: drive

Now reboot to Windows

Copy boot.lnx to your root directory
Right click on your boot.ini file select properties and uncheck read only click ok
Double click your boot.ini file and add one line at the end it should read
C:\boot.lnx="Fedora Core 3". Then save it. When you reboot your XP boot
manager will come up and you can chose Fedora it jumps to the Grub Boot manager on your
second drive.

My file looks like this

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)(1)\win dows
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)(1)\windows="Mi crosoft Windows XP Pro SP2"
/fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
c:\boot.lnx="RedHat Fedora Core 3 Project"

You call it anything you want

If you want a very stable OS Try CentOS 4.1 looks and feels just like RedHat.

[drakebasher]

Or, for those who get the creeps at having Windows boot Linux, do everything exactly as described up until:

• "Now duel booting using XP boot manager (My Preference. I don't like third party boot managers.)"

And then boot to Linux and edit /boot/grub/grub.conf to add the following paragraph:

title  Windows XP on /dev/hda1
    rootnoverify (hd1,0)
    map (hd1) (hd0)
    map (hd0) (hd1)
    makeactive
    chainloader +1
    boot

And then set your system BIOS to boot to the second (the Linux) drive.