Slashdot Mirror
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."
I am nearly 100% sure that the Redhat people are going to straighten this out, if it was a windows problem you know who'd straighten it out? The people on the GRUB or LILO team.
Hah! It doesn't even boot at all on quite a few machines. I was trying to install it on my Via Epia M board and all I got "Uncompressing kernel Image....OK" and an instant rebbot. I searched around a bit and it seems that I am not the only one with this issue. On my other box it booted into the textmode installer but didn't detect the Installation-CD wich seemed to be ok.
There are known incompatibilities with some ASUS boards but it seems there are more boards affected. I am really disappointed since I wanted to review Core2 for a german Linux magazine and I am in trouble now. It looks like I will have to test it on another box but I will also have to tell my audience about the installation trouble.
Very sad since Core1 looked pretty promising and I had high hopes for Core2.
I wonder if this could be another bug caused by a vendor forking their own kernel, like Mandrake's recent problem adding a CD-ROM packet driver that caused LG CD-ROM drives to fail. And no, this is not a troll. It's a serious question of quality control. Who should decide what ships in a so-called Linux kernel, a vendor, or Linus and his team?
Grub has that bug, not Fedora. Well ok - looks like only Fedora has this bug, but its GRUB's fault and not Fedora.
Anyways, it worked fine with me (altho it was: / in hdb5 and winXP in hda3).
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
Fedora Core 2 doesn't like to boot at all, never mind just dual boot systems. So far I have tried installing FC2 on two systems (PII laptop and VIA C3 machine) and both of them fail. The laptop insists that there is not enough disk space and then borks out and the C3 machine just reboots in an endless cycle.
For those who follow Bugzilla the numbers you need are 121819 if you have an ASUS motherboard and 120685 if you have a VIA C3 system. The second link for the C3 is much more involved and a number of the posters are deep into the kernel architecture at the moment.
This is not good, I thought that the test releases were supposed to pick things like this up ?
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
If the poster had bothered to do his homework, he'd discover that it *is* a Microsoft problem; Windows XP refuses to boot with a valid partition table and the FC2 installer tries to fix the invalid, but usable, partition table written by XP. Bottom line is it's a Microsoft bug that installing FC2 triggers. Yes, it can be worked around in the installer, but that doesn't change where the actual bug lies. In all likelihood there will be an update to fix the problem, but faulting FC2 for breaking dual boot with XP is absurd considering that XP goes to a lot of effort already to make it difficult.
Let's hope that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space 'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.
We wondered if this bug would affect us - and went with rolling out FC1 instead - the kernel 2.6.x + Nvidia driver issue (which I gather will be fixed soon), as well as this seemed too scary.
No sig for you.
That everyone I have talked to tried to REPARTITION their windows partition and then install FC2 on the freespace. It has never worked with any distro to my knowledge. Use partition magic and you should be fine.
I have WinXP and FC2 running on the same laptop, and everything seems to be booting just great. One tip I saw online somewhere was to install everything on primary partitions. Granted, you only get four, but that's enough for XP, swap, /boot, and root.
For home users, isn't that enough?
Sometimes all you here is the bad and none of the good when releasing software. You know how it goes. You here from all the people having problems but not from the ones that didn't. Any way FC2 worked great for me on my system with winxp and gentoo. Was also real lazy, installed apt-get, and sucked down all my favorite apps from freshrpms.net, atrpms.net, and dag.wieers.com. thx to those who have already compile the software for me!
FC2 is running fine on my IBM T40, but I had to tell the BIOS to show the hidden partition. With it hidden Anaconda wanted to format the disk. Unfortunately, once I un-hid the recovery partition, installed FC2, both OS's ran fine (XP + FC2), but now the BIOS claims the recover partition is trashed. I'm not 100% convince that I can't do a recover since the recover GUI comes up fine, but I'm not running anything from it. The machine is running fine and the only FC2 problem for me is I'll need a custom kernel to get my suspend on cover close back.
Actually if you check Mandrake's bugzilla, they have the same problem. You can check it out at here. Mandrake listed the bug as resolved/fixed although it doesn't look like it actually was fixed.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
No it actually isn't hosing it. it is placing the partition table within the specs that Microsoft has described for ntfs formated partitions. it is also following the partition standars as defined within the bios. (read up on lba) It apears to me that it "is" an xp thing, and some but not all xp installs are having problems with it.
I'm going to make a guess and say it is with some third party monitoring software like c-dilla or somethign that write to the boot sector and stops products from working when that part is removed. i usually use lilo instead of grub and have had times were i needed to rebuild/restore the boot sector by hand (becuase of other things not lilo).
Um why change distros? Just use Gentoo and be done with ;-) Gentoo is so fucking modular that I doubt many people have "identical" installs a week after they set it up.
For instance, Gentoo is on 4 machines in my house. One has Apache 1.3.29, I run 2.0.49. I have tvtime on two boxes [tvtuner card] and not on the others. I use Gnome on my box and my laptop and the other two boxes use KDE, etc, etc, etc...
We all started from the 2004.0 CD and ended up with essentially four different boxes all suited to our different needs.
Now I'm not trying to be a Gentoo zealot. But for desktop/laptop machines it's definitely a smooth ride.
If you're just installing random OSes for the hoot of it then you're really not being smart about it. If you're reviewing OSes probably the best way is a clean slate as the developers intended?
As someone who develops software, play games, chats, listens to music, watches tv and browses the web I can't think of a really good reason to install FC2, SUSE and Debian all at once [or in any pairs, triples of combos]. I mean if gentoo had not existed I'm sure I could managed with FC2. Installing SUSE in another partition wouldn't help me any.
This is a similarly argument to those who develop security software and have a dozen ciphers, hashes, etc. All you need is one good one.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't work on the distros. Diversity is good [so is cross-porting stuff]. My point is find a distro that works and use it.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I've been hesitant to install Fedora Core 2 on my system because of a few posts here on /. about this bug on the day of its release. As far as I can tell, though, it seems to be a problem with Win 2K and Win XP, but I don't want to take that chance unless I'm sure. I have 2 hard drives, one with Windows 98 and the other with Fedora Core 1, where I plan to install Core 2. Could someone tell me for sure if Core 2 could cause this problem with the Windows 98 install?
I was somehow always suspicious of letting Linux boot Windows - seen Windows messing up, Linux messing up and so on.
/dev/hda5 (or whatever it is), then boot to Windows (since NTFS is not writable from Linux), and since I don'h have a floppy drive, I also need a Knoppix in the middle...
So I finally settled on using the Windows boot loader to boot Linux. This way, it's a bit of pain in the a$$, as I have to manually get the boot sector from
Now, it's not easy. And it takes some time and practice and trial-and-error. But the point is, the whole setup is quite benign - Windows doesn't interfere with Linux bootloader, and neither Linux with Windows one.
I did manage to kill Linux installation to the point that I had to run lilo again... and yes, installing a new kernel means doing it all over again.
But I never had any conflicts, and unless Microsoft stops supporting this feature, never will be.
P.S. That is, of course, until Skype has a Linux version and I'll be able to throw away the Windows installation completely...
You are missing the point. This thread is about dual-booting Linux with Windows.
The reason you do all the fancy partitioning is so that Fedora can boot alongside another operating system. If your little OSX trick won't set things up for another OS, then what was your point? It's easy to partition OSX on a single-boot system?
I had Mandrake 10.0ce installed and then removed it and installed Fedora. And the worst thing happened, i couldn't boot into Windows anymore. I then re-installed Mandrake 10.0 and then the problems was gone. I could boot perfectly well into Windows. So thers IS a differnce between how Mandrake and Fedora works!
I didnt notice a problem all though I did have issues similar. Huh? Let me explain.
Before installing, I updated my BIOS and AGP firmware. Since I couldnt reboot and still be downloading the torrents, I just rebooted after I finished burning. Well the install went smooth, and booted to FC2. I updated/installed what I needed and went to go finish fiddling with XP. Grub hung. After trashing my boot sector with the recovery CD (for XP), I realized that my BIOS was seeing my XP drive as CHS instead of LBA. Fixed that in the BIOS and reinstalled GRUB and now I am all set to Dual Boot.
So I cant say for certain what the hell really did happen, but I attest it to my lack of attention to details after updating my BIOS. And yes I am using two drives for the two OS's, so it is entirely possible that it is FC2's fault. But if I did what I should have, I could say for sure.
Sigs are nice guns
I see people still don't get it in a lot of cases.
Fedora is not Redhat, Redhat is not Fedora. They are cousins, but not the same distro.
I don't code or work in IT but at least I fully understand the differences here.
Fedora is the unsupported beta community distro for hobbyists and developers. They decided on a more or less close to carved in stone release schedule, and it gets released whether every single thing is fixed or not. That's just the decision they made. It's gonna have bugs, some whoppers, some picayune, *all the time*. It's the place they *want* the bugs to show up, so that they get found out and worked on there, not in the Redhat supported version, which is older, and more refined. that's the one they don't want any bugs in, as much as possible.
Red Hat holds back, releases much more stable stuff,less often, and it's supported. that's the new paradigm, how they significantly changed their company, and I think it's a darn good idea.
I don't think there's a problem dual booting redhat and xp, as far as I know anyway.
They use Fedora to test NEW stuff, that's why they have TWO different deals there with DIFFERENT names and why fedora is 100% free. It's the decision they made last year, for _*exactly*_ these sorts of reasons as this dual boot MBR partition whammy. Stuff happens. It is not designed to run critical business applications, nor should it be used to run critical personal applications where you have zero backup or way to recover from running a beta ware pretty much bleeding edge free product.
Now, if I have that wrong, excuse me, but that's what I have gathered since last year. I don't have a dual boot machine, but I have a machine with windows on it, it boots just fine. So I can boot anything I want to boot. hardware used is so cheap now it's almost free, and in a lot of cases it is free for the hauling off, so there's little excuse to lose data. My windows machine costed me less than 10$, I bought a skid load of pentiums and a couple of pentium 2's for that amount. It's a 333 running 98se, I use it mostly for my cheap digital camera, some place to store my pictures I want to save. That's really all the important data I have. I don't store them on my fedora box, because I know "stuff can happen" when you are upgrading and trying testing and beta ware all the time. And for that matter, used hard drives are practically free, it's just not that hard to have a completely separate hard drive where you stash your stuff you don't want to lose. And you can have the separate hard drive in most towers, and physically unplug the drive you want to be sure of, for that matter, when trying out new stuff. Ya, I know it's fun to have a huge harddrive and stick all sorts things on there,but then again, when something happens, you are screwed. It's the "all the eggs in one basket" thing you are taught as a kid to watch out for, because it's a *bad idea* to do that.
And I'm glad, too. I put FC2 on yesterday, and it wouldn't upgrade, but it would and did do a clean install with custom package selection, it runs really really well here. If I had had stuff on there I wanted to keep, whether it was data or another partition with another OS, well, tough noogies, I woulda been SOL, and it would have been MY fault for being a lamer, not fedoras fault.
I don't know about anyone else, but that's how I keep them separate. I wouldn't put beta stuff on a critical machine, personal or business, and I'm certainly not going to get angry with such an amount of free work given to me when you are told in advance there is likely to be "gotchas" and then you get one.