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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
Well who would?
Works fine here with Windows Server 2003.
This guy is way out there
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?
1. Partition in an older, safe system. E.g. knoppix.
2. Install grub in an older, safe system. You should have grub installed already, if you have been using Linux on the machine previously. I never install bootloader anymore, I've been using the same one forever. Just edit the grub config to point to new kernel & root system.
3. Grub should be on the beginning of small boot partition. Never on MBR, if you can avoid it. Always create a 80MB or so partition on the start of every disk, even if you don't plan on using it (yet). This also applies to secondary disks. Kernels should always go to these partitions.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Copy and paste from here
It turns out that the bug (#115980) is a result of a few subtle but key changes within the 2.6 kernel. A certain functionality with regards to hard disk geometry has been pulled out, as the kernel developers thought it would be better if userspace utilities took care of this instead. The Bugzilla bug is related to CHS geometry problems, which most likely stems from an error within the parted utility, addressing the BIOS incorrectly. It turns out that BIOS updates tend to fix problems for many users that have been bitten by this "bug". On newer machines, this is basically non-reproducible.
All your partition are belong to us!
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
Mandrake 10.0 Official also suffers from this problem. This is leading many to believe that it is an issue with the 2.6 kernel, rather than a specific distro.
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 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--
I'm new here. Is this where I go into how much better Gentoo is?
;-)
Give it up man. *many* distros have got "bootloaders" down pat. This is just a bug, one I'm sure they're fix.
Besides Gentoo is *so* much better than Debian....
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
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.
Network install and hard disk install no longer work the old way with Fedora Core 2 (via bootdisk.img and netdrv.img), for the simple reason that the kernel no longer fits on a floppy disk. But there are workarounds. I made some notes on this issue.
You got to know someone at M$ is pissed they never thought of it before.
I don't see why people are upset either. Fedora has provided its users with a wonderful feature: in addition to a bootable Linux system, Fedora will remove Windows the only way a real hacker would: by destroying it, in a way that leaves no doubt in the mind of that Windows install that it is unwanted, that it has been defeated, and the Fedora has vanquished it to the depths of /dev/null.
Fedora, I salute you.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
I had a similar booting problem when installing Gentoo. As Gentoo is very hands-on, and has quite a community, it was easy to find the fix.
First, the fault is Microsoft's. (Seriously, did you expect anything else?). The point is that Windows XP is a hog which believes that it is the one and only system on the computer. Therefore, if it is not on hda, it will put its hands on its ears and start singing aloud "La-la-la-la I can't hear you!". I have Linux on my hda, and WXP getting dustier and dustier on hdb. It would not start until I added the following lines in grub.conf:
title=Windows Xp
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd1,0) (hd0,0)
map (hd0,0) (hd1,0)
chainloader (hd1,0)+1
I'm not aware of how much Fedora lets the user write their grub.conf, but if they have a GUI tool, it might just not be programmed for this. After all, on my office machine, where Windows has been left on hda1, things works well out-of-the-box. Maybe they assumed everybody would use this configuration.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
the fedora people should atleast put up some serious warnings in their install guides.
:)
I think a headline on the biggest news channel on the internet should serve as a good enough warning
See this post for a fix.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
As you'll have seen from various other comments; Mandrake 10 has the same problem therefore if you're using M10 without problems then FC2 will work just as well.
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
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.
I hate to rain on people's parades, but if you're making a system dual-boot with Windows, the conservative/safe thing to do is NOT install a bootloader.
Just use the one that comes with NT/XP. Of course it is limited in features (esp. compared to GRUB) but it works.
It's not a ton of work either:
Write a LILO bootloader to a partition, use 'dd' to copy that to a file (floppy helps), copy the "file" to Windows, and edit boot.ini to point to it.
Sure, it's not automated, but we're talking just a few steps, and then your're 100% confident that the next upgrade of Windows will not choke.
It would be nice if the PC industry could get "all OS vendors" to agree to universal bootloader, and maybe even get it in the BIOS, but the situation is what it is. You've got to be very careful when dual booting, especially with BETA software.
Sounds like the GRUB and kernel people need to work closer together. I don't know about GRUB, but the kernel has some pretty good testsuites so I am surprised this was not caught by the Linux Test Project (LTP). I'm hearing it's actually a 2.6 kernel problem, and since not a lot of people have upgraded to 2.6 we're hearing about it now.
I recently installed Fedora Core 2 on a computer alongside Windows 2000 and had no trouble dual booting. That particular bug has been seen more often with the Test releases of Fedora Core, as should be expected. If it does happen to you, the problem can be easily fixed by running fixmbr in Recovery Console for 2000/XP.
Suse 9.1 has the same problem. :) I guess not as many people are using Suse 9.1, since Fedora Core 2 problem arrived to Slashdot sooner. :))
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Some people were guessing the problem is due to the 2.6 kernel reporting a different geometry from 2.4 and the tools not being updated to correct for this. I know that even though I didn't repartition, after installing FC2 over my FC1 installation the start and end cylinders reported by fdisk -l are completely different.
Right, I was hit by this. I'm a linux newbie. But I solved it.
/dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda"
./sfdisk to make it work. In my case, i had to add the -force flag to the right hand side of the pipe.
:)
To fix it:
-If you don't already have it, get and install sfdisk (there are RPMs out there, no deps)
Run (presuming your hdd is hda) as root "sfdisk -d
You may have to cd to sbin and replace sfdisk with
That command ran, and then i could run WinXP from Grub just fine
However, FC2 has many other major bugs that I and others have found:
- Nvidia drivers don't work (i know it's nvidia's fault, but it's a stumbling block)
- As Xorg is in use, ATI drivers are a bitch to install (although if you use google there is a very good howto out there).
- The kludge i had to use to get software mixing working (dmix under alsa) was inexcusable. With alsa in 2.6, you'd think by default you'd have software mixing. An OS where I can't listen to XMMS and hear GAIM alerts at the same time is just ludicrous. Even sillier is the fact that GAIM alerts are queued, so when i close XMMS i get a minute solid of notification noises playing. Simultaneous sounds SHOULD work out of the box. Esound and arts are not in the equation any more, as alsa mixing is a much better solution - so why isn't it implemented?
- Totem just won't work. G-Streamer broke totally shortly afterwards.
- There's no easy way to edit your applications menu, without either SUing, or logging in as root. This seems daft for a multiuser OS like linux.
I know these bugs aren't Fedora only, but they need addressing if Fedora wants to remain OS of choice for many.
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
It is interesting that BIOS updates fix that problem for most people. I recently installed FC2 and had exactly the same problem booting between it and XP. I was finally able to fix it by changing the drive geometry setting in my BIOS from Auto (which was using CHS) to LBA. As soon as I did that it started to boot XP again.
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.
Despite what you said, if you look at bug 7959 in the mandrake bug database, you'll see that official still has the problem. Mandrake's fix is apparently setting the bios mode to lba before installation. However some people have reported the problem is still around with this workaround in effect.
"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
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!
I've been fighting with Win2k to boot again for the past 2 or 3 days now, ever since I did my (full install) upgrade to FC2. I finally wiped my poor drive of everything and now have Win2k only running on the box at the moment. So much for my FC2 (x86_64), Mandrake 10, SuSE 9.1 (x86_64), and Knoppix partitions. <sigh>
In all fairness though, FC1 seemed to upgrade to FC2 quite well when I chose that option initially. I was just having a problem getting the nVidia drivers loaded afterwards so I thought, "Let's just nuke the FC1 partition and do a full install and see how that goes." Little did I know that even with my old grub.conf ready to go it would wreck my Win2K booting. Oh everything else booted just fine, but Win2K would just sit there. I tried all the usual Win2K fixes, booting to console from the Win2k CD, doing FIXMBR (it complained of a non-standard/messed up partition table) & FIXBOOT but that did not solve the issue (I guess it might have helped if I'd had an ERD for the box but I didn't... I will this time around!). Those "fixes" just got me to the "Error loading operating system" message at boot.
Thank goodness for Knoppix 3.4!!! I was able to pull off all my user files from the NTFS partition with it. Oh yes, the NTFS partition was still there in all it's glory. But would it let me boot? NOOOOoooo....
Ack! How I loathe Windows OS, but once I get the wife used to another accounting package maybe I can rid myself of it. Until then, I guess it is "mission critical" to my household? (Aye! What a frightening thought!) Well, I guess that begs the question then, is it the love of money or micro$oft that is the "root of all evil"? Maybe the two are synonomous? Hmmm...
So here I am sitting with only one troublesome OS thinking to myself what should I dare install next... Maybe SuSE 9.1 again. SuSE seems to always "just work" for me...
I wonder what changed? I mean it all booted under grub from FC1. This is a brand new machine--AMD64 w/ nForce3 chipset, would the BIOS really need upgrading? Ah well, I will grab an image of the NTFS partition this time around and avoid the heartache again if possible...
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...
Its a special feature that removes security threats.
In my case, no problem. I repartitioned according to the existing scheme and did a clean install of FC2, which worked fine, and had no problems booting WinXP.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
After screwing around with it for quite some time, I took the suggestion of someone who replied to me in fedoraforum.org and set the harddrive to LBA mode from auto. Windows began to boot :-), only problem is it had to finish a repair install of windows, and now the screen goes blank after the windows startup logo. I'm not sure how related it is to the initial problem, but for anyone having problems, try forcing LBA. It may save you a lot of time.
Actually, that's precisely what it is. 2.6 reports a different layout (typically 16 cylinders instead of, say 255 in the logical one) and grub sets itself up this way. Next, it appears that even when the BIOS was explicitly instructed to use LBA access, this is somehow overriden by GRUB, with the result that trying to launch the NT bootloader fails.
The sfdisk solution on Fedora's bugzilla fails when sfdisk figures a partition does not start at the right cylinder boundary. Apparently, one can try to change the head count only for the windows boot partition, with the hope that it fixes the boot-through-grub problem (I am yet to try this). I guess the biggest problem is for people who don't have an LBA option in BIOS.
As a proof that it's not Fedora-related, I have the same problem with mdk10.
Finally, there seems to be no problem if one sets up the installer's kernel to use LBA access for the hd (no switching to CHS occurs).
Hmm... So you're one of those anti-zealot zealots.
I'm trying to figure out what zealot-free system you'll be able to run...
Linux? right out.
Windows? Nope: OSS is "a cancer", DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
Sun? No, they were head ABM cheerleaders until a couple of weeks ago.
Apple? Obviously not.
Amiga? Nope: the OS was perfect in every way, only a conspiracy kept it down.
VMS? Ditto
OS/2? Ditto
BeOS? Ditto
*BSD? Maybe, but then again there's more than a few anti-viral license zealots
Netware? Possibly, but now they're in bed with SuSE.
Tandy TRS-80: That's the ticket. Nobody will admit to having used it, much less spew zealotry about it. What's more, you can pick up spare machines on ebay for a couple of bucks.
Fedora Core 2 ships an almost stock 2.6 kernel. Which it would have taken you a whole minute to confirm before opening your piehole.
Democrat delenda est
Win2K introduced "dynamic" disks, which changed how the partition table worked. Partition type 0x42 means the disk is dynamic and the real information is contained at the end of the disk. 0x42 is supposed to be a container partition meant to span the disk and say "don't mess with me". An exception are boot and/or system partitions, as those have to be read early during boot before the dynamic disk stuff is loaded. Thus, boot/system partitions can be type 0x42 but not span the disk.
Anyway, as a wild-assed guess I'd check that out. Perhaps lilo/grub doesn't play well with dynamic disks.
Upgrading doesn't seem to have problems - I upgraded my dual boot XP/FC1 box to FC2 yesterday as well, no issues.
My understanding is the issues lie when the partition table is edited. Upgrading generally doesn't modify the partition table.
There are also reports of people who don't have problems - it depends in the end on the BIOS. Some say using LBA on your drives solves the problem as well vs. the default Auto (CHS).
$ man woman *
-bash:
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.
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.
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.
Oh yeah, and when we get our asses dragged into court, let's tell them that if we allow Windows to boot by itself, without typing the machine code, that would cause the computer to run more slowly, just as removing Internet Explorer would do for Windows 98.
This is Linux kernel 2.6 - Mandrake 10, Suse 9.1 and Fedora Core 2 all suffer from this problem.
Switching to Debian won't help if you want Linux kernel 2.6. Your paritition table will be fubared.
Furthermore, people do know what's causing the problem. The Linux kernel now doesn't show the same disk geometry as the BIOS does. The fix is to use sfdisk to recreate the partition table.
A year or so ago, I tried to install Mandrake 9, Red Hat 8 and Red Hat 7.3 on my old Compaq Deskpro 4000 machine. None of them would install. All of them would either fail to read the partition table - after creating and partitioning and formatting it using the utilities supplied with those distros - or would completely trash the partition table.
Red Hat 7.0, however, would blow on the system with absolutely no problem or complaint whatsoever.
After doing some partition work on my latest system with parted, Partition Magic 5 and Partition Magic 8 cannot in any way read my partition table. Windows (98 first, now 2000 and XP) loads fine, Linux (RH 7.3, Knoppix, other Live CD distros) loads fine, all other partition managers (BootItNG, Ranish) see and handle the partition table. ONLY Partition Magic cannot do anything with the partition table - and it is supposed to be the "premier" partition table manager on the market!
So now we have THIS crap with Fedora Core 2!
Guys, the partition table is NOT rocket science. It's a few bytes on a disk with a few variations in what each byte means. It's been around for decades.
So why in hell can't people who write this stuff GET IT RIGHT? What is the goddamn problem with you programmers?
I realize that hard disk manufacturers are constantly screwing around with their geometry reporting to the BIOS, and of course not writing any Linux drivers, but still a bug of this sort should not exist in any modern OS.
Get it together.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The fix is here.
The VIA C3 problem didn't get caught because it worked in the betas. The bug involved is in all the 2.6.x kernels but depends on the alignment and size of the kernel. While the beta kernel worked the final kernel didnt get lucky.
Ingo and others are currently working through this one to try and find the cause. At the moment nobody is sure if it is a Linux bug or a CPU errata being tripped.
Oh yea 'cause FAT32 is so great since journalled filesystems suck, we should definitely allow our data to be lost due to power/system failure to avoid rare NTFS issues
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
Use a more reliable partitioning utility like BootItNG (not freeware, but you can use it from the install menu for partitioning without actually installing it) or the DOS partitioner Ranish Partition Manager.
Do not use parted or Partition Magic - parted is not reliable and Partition Magic can't handle partition tables after parted has screwed them up.
Also, apparently, make sure your BIOS is set to LBA mode, not Auto or CHS.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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?
I have had no problem with my Dual Boot WinXP / FC2 machine. Boots by default to Linux, I only have windows on there for games, but since Doom3 will come out on Linux, I guess I will have 1 less reason to boot into windows.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Wish I would have read this article, instead of downloading 3 iso cd's of Fedora core 2 and spending countless hours installing it into VMware! It couldn't boot with Grub, no matter what I did. I DID solve the problem:
1. Cursed
2. Downloaded Redhat 9 iso's
3. Installed in Vmware: worked like a charm.
Curse curse curse.
"You can talk about Cha Cha
Tango, Waltz, or de Rumba
Fedora's dance has more title
You jump in the saddle
Hold on to de bridle!"
Windows 2k has tendency to screw linux partitions by forcing dynamic discs on certain conditions, such as hardware change. Windows can render your linux unbootable just by adding another ide controller.
/boot partition for any linux(es) at the beginning of your disc. Put Windows partion behind it and all others systems partitions behind windows.
/home on separate drive, which allows to change distros, format, upgrade, reorganize system partions and so on, also keeps your home safe from windows, if you disable that drive in them.
Sometimes, forcing lba solves the problem when bios geometry and reported native ide geometry differs. People with this problem should try bios autodetection feature before forcing LBA.
Grub is much less technologically advanced than lilo, because it does not care about many different bios bugs. For example, it is not possible to place grub on the zip drive media or flash card, becuase grub does not "recognise" bios drive number. I guess grub can have geometry problem on very large disks too, which may be symptomatic to article author.
Lilo is much friendly to windows than grub, at least it is tweakable to be friendly.
There are several board bios/controllers bios hard drive limits, by the age of technology: 2.4G, 8G, 32G, 128G, 1000G.
Often, flashing new bios will help, but I would not recommend that to lamers.
If your bios shall boot from bigger drive then limit is, WHOLE boot partition must reside in the limited area of the disk. So make sure you have a little
I would not recommend to have both linux and windows 2k/XP on the same drive, because of dynamic discs partition change may emerge from windows at any time. This is insidious from Microsoft. I would also recommend to keep
If machine becomes unbootable to linux, it's easy to boot a linux CD (I have a pocket-size lnx-bbc 2.1/i386 cd within my portfeille), then mount a partition, then remount existing dev tree under it, then chroot to it, then rerun lilo. Last week I did that repair in just 40 seconds, and it was very impressive to bystanders.
Just for case, I keep lilo on beginning of every hard drive (6 hard drives on my desktop+2 other ide devices), with complete menu available to boot almost anything from any drive), so it is possible to swap my drives at will on their interfaces. It is also possible to boot from bios on another drive (bios C, D, E, F) if something goes wrong, then select correct system in lilo menu.
And last, but not least: keep your machine well cooling if you have lot of hard drives.
There you are, staring at me again.