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Fedora Core Doesn't Like to Dual Boot?
schwatoo writes "It seems Fedora Core doesn't like to boot alongside Windows 2K or XP. According to a bug first reported in February on Fedora's bugzilla site it has a tendency to chew up partition maps making it impossible to dual boot into Windows. No one seems to know quite what is causing the problem and a lot of people are ending up with unbootable machines."
if this was a Microsoft problem the amount of bitching and conspiracy theories would never end. Lets see how it plays out.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
So much for fast turn around on bug fixes for linux suddenly Windows doesn't seem so slow, I'd consider this a serious bug, one that could lead to the loss of a lot of important data and should have been addressed by now. The fact that they don't know what causes it is just plain worrying. Although I have to admit you've gotta be pretty brave to install linux on the same disk as Windows, most distros make it all too easy to format the disk and re-create the partition tables.
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
If a bug that serious has been known since February, it was totally irresponsible to go ahead with the release. It isn't just some nuisance you can work around - people have lost a lot of data from this.
--This is a self-referential sig--
its intentional and says so in the manual and alerts you during the install. This is supposed to work but fails randomly.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I thought they'd straighten this out when it came out in February, at least I thought so enough to download the ISO's, but now that I see they haven't there's NO WAY I'm going to install Fedora on any of my systems.
This is a REAL problem, and many people are going to end up losing a lot of data because they won't know how to fix their MBR's or their partition tables or whatever it takes. There's more info in the bugzilla report, but it only affects drives larger than ~120GB (or so) and SOMETIMES can be fixed with fixmbr in the windows recovery startup.
I liked fedora, it was easy to use, and did what I needed it to do, but now they've shown that their "new process" for development doesn't work. I'll go back to trying out some of the other distro's to see who else can get my support.
http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/pipermail/linux
Here's a quick executive summary for those who don't want to read the thread:
Linux 2.6 kernels started to report bogus disk geometries thus some unadjusted partitioning tools create bad partition table resulting unbootable Windows.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
linux isn't the operating system every one seems to have to have. i mean linux is a luxury and not a "microsoft" product. if longhorn or whatever caused this the attitude is "you shouldn't have been playing with it" it will always be the underdogs fault when the attitude is "i can't live without windows because it is so much easier to learn or operate or whatever"
There isn't firewire support compiled into the kernel. If you want to connect an iPod or use any other firewire devices you have to recompile the kernel. That is a really stupid omission especially when it was reported in bugzilla during test 2!
Windows is installed on a 30gB partition I installed Fedora on a 512M swap and a 10G /ex2 partition
I expected it to work so I had it configure Grub (or it didnt' give me a choice, I dont remember)
Anyway, it rebooted and I saw that it didn't show my Windows partition like Slackware 9.1 before it, and Redhat 9, and Mandrake 10, and Gentoo 2004.0
Anyway... I didn't know a way to fix my problem so I quit Fedora, gave my CDs to a homeless man and installed good old Slack...
Anyway, I'd have to say that Linux (Specifically Dropline Gnome 2.6 with Slack 9.1) still isn't close to XP for me as a Desktop operating system. I'm using XP now and have transfered some MP3s over to the space it use to inhabit.
I like Win98SE. Win2K is pretty good. XP sucks donkey balls. I like RH7.3. RH8 and RH9 have a number of nagging problems. Fedora, for all intensive purposes, is Beta software at best, Alpha software at worst.
That being said, nobody in their right mind is going to dual boot Win2K and Fedora on a production machine.
Yup. People should stop playing around with these toy distributions. Install Debian and you can forget about all of these problems. Easy updates, too. And, you can choose between stability and new-ness quite easily. I run "unstable" and haven't had a problem (and everything is nice and new).
Also, my partition table isn't f00bar'd.
My other car is first.
I dunno, all the video toasters I saw didn't seem to be white boxes running cracked code. I think the problem was poor marketing, and being too far ahead of their time. I mean, you could EDIT VIDEO on the damn thing in 1992.
Run debian stable and nothing will be foobar'ed
Run debian unstable and you'll easily recover from anything that gets hosed.
Fedora seems to me like the "demoware" versoin of all those shareware programs out there.
you install linux, and window breaks. why are you hammering on linux developers' doors? go bitch at microsoft to fix the problem: you now have a genuine reason to waste that money that they forced out of computer manufacturers.
What is with bootloaders recently. 9 years of using Linux I never had a problem with bootloaders and now this weekend I haven't been able to get any to work. Why did Linux distros move to Grub from Lilo anyways?