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Fedora Core Doesn't Like to Dual Boot?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the nobody-noticed-that? dept.

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."

11 of 608 comments (clear)

  1. Now by ArchieBunker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Now by lazy_arabica · · Score: 5, Insightful
      if this was a Microsoft problem the amount of bitching and conspiracy theories would never end. Lets see how it plays out.
      Stop trolling, and let people speak. I am bored of Microsoft / Linux zealots bashing each other before they even post.

      By the way, there is a Microsoft problem, as the Windows installer destroys the MBR where lilo/grub is usually installed - at least, it was true in win2k and XP. And I didn't see any slashdot story about that.
    2. Re:Now by EpsCylonB · · Score: 3, Insightful

      if this was a Microsoft problem the amount of bitching and conspiracy theories would never end. Lets see how it plays out.

      I think we should wait to see how long until this bug is fixed before we accuse redhat of doing this on purpose.

    3. Re:Now by tolan-b · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well XP won't respect an existing Linux install, if you install it after Linux then you can guarantee there won't be a Linux entry in your boot menu ;)

      Still, this is a very serious problem.
      From what I've heard it seems to be a problem mainly with dual boot where you have each OS on a separate drive, rather than both on the same partitioned drive.

      I finally got mine working by reversing the drives that grub thought everything was on. Windows was on primary master, and I installed Fedora on primary slave. Rebooted and it was dead. It turned out that setting grub to point at hd1 for Windows and hd0 for Fedora got things working. I have no idea why.

      Windows still doesn't work, I think the Wndows bootloader that grub forwards on to has been corrupted, but I haven't looked into this in detail yet, I was lucky that most of my data storage is on my house server.

    4. Re:Now by Graftweed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Before installing Fedora everything's fine, after installing it people lose the ability to boot into windows. It's as simple as this really. How can you expect linux to take over the desktop with the kind of attitude you just displayed?

      Yes, MS is partly to blame, but joe user won't give a rat's ass about the finer points of booting operating systems, he'll just (quite rightly) blame fedora and be done with it.

      Furthermore this is a bug that's been around for a few months, even before the release of Core 2 so there's really no excuse for this sort of thing. If you're designing an OS to run alongside others it's your responsibility to make sure it doesn't break anything, even if the others are broken somehow.

      Please don't tell me 'Oh, but MS doesn't do this!', that's really no excuse is it?

    5. Re:Now by EvilAlien · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Please define "technically-invalid-but-working".

      Do you have a reference which describes what a technically valid partition table is, how the XP partition table is somehow "technally invalid", or anything else to support your assertions?

      --
      perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
    6. Re:Now by gwalla · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Joe User doesn't dual-boot. Joe User wouldn't even think of having more than one OS on his system. This is a problem for techies.

      --
      Oper on the Nightstar
  2. Re:Not comparable by DougJohnson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  3. Here's your trouble... by MsGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This article has more info:
    http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/pipermail/linux- thinkpad/2004-May/017754.html

    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.
  4. Re:Not comparable by lessthanjakejohn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Not comparable by jrockway · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.