Trouble with dual boot Linux/WinXP

Question

Hello, I've just purchased new 250GB IDE drive to the Dell Prec. 420 Workstation, trying to have dual boot for Win XP and Fedora Core Linux. It used to work well with the old 17GB SCSI drive when I installed WinXP at the primary partition, then installed Linux using GRUB boot loader. The GRUB was in MBR and had separated primary partition about 100MB. Old good times.... New drive (250GB IDE): I installed WinXP, created a separated prim. partition for it and it worked so far. Then I installed Fedora using GRUB in MBR. Installed well, but the machine is not able to boot. All what I have are four letters 'GRUB' and a big silence. It looks GRUB is not able to start. I booted from the CD with Fedora and take a look on the /boot and grub.conf files, nothing suspicious. Any suggestions ? I tried to google the issues little bit, get an answer that GRUB has problem bigger than 32GB drives, that BIOS need to support it, etc. Thank you, Juraj

Tzao · Answer

This is a symptom that GRUB cannot find the next stage boot code
(stage 1.5 or stage 2). Unfortunately it might not be easy to
show you how to fix it. Typically you want to boot from a CD or
DVD media and enter 'text' at the boot prompt (or rescue mode).
If you use text mode, wait until it asks for the Language, then
hit Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get a BASH prompt. Then it's the tricky part:

1) Find out where the /boot partition locates.
2) Rerun the GRUB to re-install MBR code.

Say, if I use 'fdisk -l' and find that /boot is in /dev/hda1
and / is in /dev/hda2. This is what I usually do

mkdir /foo
mount /dev/hda2 /foo
/foo/sbin/grub

This will put you in the GRUB prompt. Then you do

GRUB> root (hd0,0)
GRUB> setup (hd0)

(Notice that GRUB> is the prompt, not the string you enter.)
Here (hd0,0) correspond to /dev/hda1, your /boot partition.
'setup (hd0)' should write to the MBR of the fist hard drive.
If GRUB indicates that it has succeeded. Then you can

umount /foo

and then reboot. Good luck!

jpriskin · Answer

Interesting why GRUB cannot find the next stages.

I have following part. table:

/dev/hda1 30GB NTFS
/dev/hda2 150GB NTFS
/dev/hda3 100MB /boot
...

Is that an issues that /boot starts 180GB from the beginning and I should move to the front the /boot ? Does GRUB has such a limitations ? I did not find anything on the web.

Thanks for the tip,I suppose I understood it. It's not clear why the GRUB lost the MBR.

Thanks,
Juraj

Tzao · Answer

Hmm... where is your Linux partition? You have three
partitions -- two NTFSs and one /boot (linux). GRUB
should be able to find the stuffs in /boot even if it
is beyond the first 1240 cylinders. How about show
me the output of 'fdisk -l' and contents to grub.conf?

jpriskin · Answer

Quickly: I'm on the way home, where my PC is. The / is in the Extended partition. I'll show you the fdisk -l and grub.conf later.

My suspicions are that I have either disabled the LBA, or there is an issue with BIOS or I did some stupid mistake somewhere.

By the way: The way you recommended to me to re-write the MBR via GRUB is the same as to use grub-install /dev/hda ?

Peggy Tups · Answer

Yes, the most ideal way to resolve this issue is to boot into the linux rescue and pass this command  grub--instlall /dev/hda or whatever your disk is....this should solve the issue or else simply reinstall the whole thing again if possible!!   Hope this helps!!

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