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."

Comments

Now

[ArchieBunker]

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

Re:Now

[lazy_arabica]

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.

Re:Now

[tolan-b]

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.

Re:Now

[Graftweed]

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?

Re:Now

[gwalla]

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.

Here's your trouble...

[MsGeek]

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.