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

Not comparable

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not comparable

[pr0c]

It affected my 40 gig drive also. It completely fucked my partition table only allowing me to boot into fedora. I figured o-well i'll just add my windows entry and it still would not boot windows. Switching to lilo instead of grub didn't help... I got nervious and then proceeded to try to mount the ntfs partition only to find it was all fucked up. Fixmbr didn't do jack, a cd with partition magic on it wasn't able to fix it either. I lost my entire ntfs drive, i keep all my valuables on a fat32 drive for both windows and linux to use and I didn't lose that thank god but I still had to spend a day installing windows, software and service packs, etc. In short fedora took my first partition out when it fucked up the mbr.

I've tried every release of fedora just to see how it would work (betas, etc included), it is always a buggy piece of crap. I'll NEVER try fedora again.

Way Too Buggy

[Ed Almos]

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

Re:Now

[akeru]

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.

Use Separate Disks

[Blarfy_Snarflepoop]

We have a policy within our Department of Computer Science that if you're going to have a dual-boot machine, you have to have separate disks. Considering how cheap hard drives are, no one puts up a fight - and I swear that it has saved us so much hassle - use Ghost for the windows disk, and kickstart for the Fedora disk. Countless hours (and headaches) have been spared with this method.

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.

Re:its a hardware problem

[scheme]

Besides, Mandrake has a 2.6 kernel and doesn't have this problem. Sounds like bad QC on the Fedora group.

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.