Fedora Core Doesn't Like to Dual Boot?

Now by ArchieBunker · 2004-05-23 04:28 · 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

Re:Now by lazy_arabica · 2004-05-23 04:34 · 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.
Re:Now by EpsCylonB · 2004-05-23 04:36 · 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.
Re:Now by tolan-b · 2004-05-23 04:36 · 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.
Re:Now by akeru · 2004-05-23 04:38 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Re:Now by Timesprout · 2004-05-23 04:43 · Score: 5, Informative

well it was first reported in Feb so oviously they are in no great hurry to fix it.

--
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Re:Now by akeru · 2004-05-23 04:55 · Score: 4, Informative

Had you bothered to understand my post, you would have seen that I acknowledge that Fedora "messes with the partition table". However, it does so by correcting a technically-invalid-but-working one to a technically-valid-and-working-for-everything-but-X P one.

--
Let's hope that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space 'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.
Re:Now by DJStealth · 2004-05-23 05:00 · Score: 5, Informative

The windows boot loader searches a file called boot.ini, inside it, it contains disk and partition numbers.

Since you swapped your HD's around, the disk #'s are now different, therefore it won't boot.
Re:Now by Senjutsu · 2004-05-23 05:06 · Score: 5, Funny

Wow, can you believe it?? People have different standards of conduct for convicted monopolists than they have for honest companies. And they're willing to cut a company that hasn't pulled this kind of crap before more slack than a company that makes a habit of it.

How crazy is that?</sarcasm>
Re:Now by Graftweed · 2004-05-23 05:11 · 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?
Re:Now by EvilAlien · 2004-05-23 05:57 · 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)'
Re:Now by bob65 · 2004-05-23 06:25 · Score: 4, Informative

Are you sure? I encountered this "bug" when installing FC2 alongside Windows XP - in my case, changing my hd mode to "LBA" from "Auto" in the BIOS allows both FC2 and WinXP to boot. However, I didn't really like that, so I ended up booting to single-user mode in Fedora and doing the following, as suggested by someone in the bug discussion:
sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda
(I may have needed a --force in there as well). After that, I was able to set the mode back to "Auto" and both Windows XP and FC2 would boot. Note that all I did though, was basically just recreate my partition table by dumping the info provided by sfdisk and piping it back in sfdisk.
One explanation I read is that the Anaconda screws up the CHS values in the partition table. Windows uses both CHS and LBA, and so when it reads the CHS values it cannot boot. However setting the mode to LBA manually in the BIOS forces Windows to read the LBA values. Linux only uses LBA, so it doesn't matter what mode your hd is set to in the BIOS.
Of course, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but if someone could provide a better explanation...
Re:Now by schotty · 2004-05-23 06:46 · Score: 3, Interesting

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 ...
Re:Now by gwalla · 2004-05-23 07:22 · 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

... doesn't like to boot alongside Windows by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-23 04:28 · Score: 4, Funny

Well who would?

W2K3? by LittleLebowskiUrbanA · 2004-05-23 04:28 · Score: 3, Informative

Works fine here with Windows Server 2003.

--
This guy is way out there

Not comparable by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-23 04:31 · Score: 5, Interesting

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 by DougJohnson · 2004-05-23 04:40 · 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.
Re:Not comparable by Luguber123 · 2004-05-23 05:02 · Score: 5, Funny

In the Microsoft world this would be considered a feature.
Re:Not comparable by lessthanjakejohn · 2004-05-23 05:47 · 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.
Re:Not comparable by bob65 · 2004-05-23 06:30 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Actually it affected me with my 30GB drive as well. Fixmbr didn't seem to work, but recreating the partition table using sfdisk did seem to work:
sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda
Re:Not comparable by pr0c · 2004-05-23 07:06 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
Re:Not comparable by antirename · 2004-05-23 08:48 · Score: 3, Interesting

I've been looking for an OS to replace RH9 on my machines that use it... this makes Fedora (actually, any distro using 2.6) look bad. On the other hand, I don't think this bug would affect me. I have one dual boot machine, with two primary master hard drives in it. One with RH9, one with W2k. If I wanted to boot into W2k (haven't in a couple of years, but you never know) I power down the machine and swap the IDE cable. Yeah, that's primitive, but it works. Computers are cheap these days, and it's just a matter of time in my opinion before a worm that can hose windows AND linux is released, that I'd rather have each OS on a seperate machine or at least separate drive. I'd guess a lot of slashdotters have a windows gaming machine (I do) that doesn't run linux and is basically disposable as far as the OS goes. If my gaming machine gets borked, I just ghost it back and hit windows update. That way it doesn't affect any real work. Unless you can't afford more than one machine, why would you want to dual boot?
Re:Not comparable by jrockway · 2004-05-23 08:50 · 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.
Re:Not comparable by pr0c · 2004-05-23 09:25 · Score: 3, Interesting

Agreed, I used debian for years and have been using Gentoo for a lil over a year by now. I no longer recommend any distro since it turns into a distro war but there are some I suggest not using such as Fedora. I'll probably switch back to debian shortly here actually, it is my favorite distro.

One distro I am keeping a very close eye on is SUSE. Since novell bought suse and ximian it has a lot of potential; especially in the workplace. SUSE _could_ be the distro that breaks into large offices everywhere (they all have in one or another..).

Some hints for safe partitioning by ultrabot · 2004-05-23 04:34 · Score: 4, Informative

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

Re:Some hints for safe partitioning by UnderScan · 2004-05-23 05:19 · Score: 5, Informative

It may not be necessary to completely format and wipe clean the HD if you lose the partition table. To repair/write a partition table to disk, normally you might use fdisk and have to hand enter the sectors/blocks boundaries of the partitions.There is a open source tool called gpart. gpart will guess the partitions on the HD and can also write a new partition table to HD. I have had an instance where electrical outages & fluctuations caused the HD to lose its partition table. The table was inacurately identified the HD as one FAT16 patition when there was really a linux partition and a swap partition. gpart was able to clear this up and I did not lose and data. Go to http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/ to get the source or a binary for linux and freebsd. I think gpart is available on knoppix and perhaps also Gentoo LiveCDs.
Re:Some hints for safe partitioning by Sweetshark · 2004-05-23 07:52 · Score: 3, Informative

I think gpart is available on knoppix and perhaps also Gentoo LiveCDs.
Dunno about that, but it is definitly available on SystemRescueCd

its a hardware problem by ozzy_cow · 2004-05-23 04:35 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

Re:its a hardware problem by Epistax · 2004-05-23 04:56 · Score: 5, Funny

Thanks a lot. We get an interesting topic and you had to go and look up the answer. I thought the whole point of slashdot was an understanding that none of us actually read the article, let alone find new material on the matter!

I am so disillusioned right now.
Re:its a hardware problem by scheme · 2004-05-23 05:08 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

--
"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
Re:its a hardware problem by hurtta · 2004-05-23 06:28 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
On there is quite good description what is happening:
Part of the reason I could not understand the bug, is that I could not believe windows XP was still using the error prone int13 function 2 (CHS based) instead of the (available everywhere for some time) int13 function 0x42. Under linux, grub and lilo only use function 2 when function 0x42 fails (they don't even ask the BIOS if it manages 0x42 since some BIOS don't report correctly having this functionality, cf FORCE_LBA in grub) The other reason is that I thought BIOS faking heads number (the so-called LBA mode) was a choice independant of the content of the drive. This is wrong, the BIOS tries to adapt its mode based on the partition table [1] So here is what happened: - kernel 2.6 doesn't try to give the logical geometry, and gives the physical geometry instead [2] - diskdrake uses the physical geometry to generate the CHS information (which is a broken duplicate of the linear sector number) - the BIOS sees the partition table uses a different CHS geometry, and adapt to it - ... and Windows computes the CHS to read its stage1.5 based on the previous geometry that it keeps in its boot sector. Alas the CHS doesn't get the same sector and Windows's boot dies (with very bad error detection) [3]
That is comment 21. That same comment indicates that problem is fixed:
Code fix description: inspired by the way new fdisk and parted detects the logical geometry based on the partition table [4]. parted code is especially quite robust. The fix is now included in cooker (DrakX #1.912), so: I still would like to access the BIOS geometry, esp. for empty partition tables. But kernel 2.6 doesn't give us this (/sys/firmware/edd/int13_dev80/default_heads is plain wrong on a box here) Known workaround: forcing LBA mode in the BIOS

The Fedora says: by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-23 04:36 · Score: 3, Funny

All your partition are belong to us!

Mandrake also by cyphr555 · 2004-05-23 04:37 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

Re:Mandrake also by Pros_n_Cons · 2004-05-23 05:19 · Score: 5, Informative

Finally half way down the thread someone admits It's not just a Fedora issue. SuSe 9.1 also has the problem
Mandrake Bug
SuSe Bug
Read This Page If you want to find out whats responsible.

--

-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller

Way Too Buggy by Ed+Almos · 2004-05-23 04:38 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Here's your trouble... by MsGeek · 2004-05-23 04:42 · 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.

Use Separate Disks by Blarfy_Snarflepoop · 2004-05-23 04:44 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

--
No sig for you.

Re:Use Separate Disks by Pros_n_Cons · 2004-05-23 05:35 · Score: 4, Informative

Seperate disks doesn't matter with this issue, I had XP on hda and installed FC2-test2 on hdb and this bug still bit me. If you install in a work enviornment you definatly should NOT dual boot but if you do there is a safe way of tricking the hard drives into thinking they are both hda and not touching the other. Learn about it here It doesn't work for everyone but if it does, problems like this wont happen again.

--

-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller

Envy by WinterpegCanuck · 2004-05-23 04:47 · Score: 5, Funny

You got to know someone at M$ is pissed they never thought of it before.

...Could it be this problem? by orzetto · 2004-05-23 04:49 · Score: 3, Informative

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

Re:...Could it be this problem? by Sigma+7 · 2004-05-23 05:50 · Score: 5, Informative

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)

If you have to do that, then that means you've either moved a hard drive around, or did not install Windows XP in the directory it currently runs on (with the path including Drive and partition numbers.)

The solution is to modify Boot.ini in order to update the pointers to the Windows directory. You can either modify the raw references to the disk and partition number, or change it to a Dos-style path of "C:\WINDOWS". If you really wanted to, you can even run install multiple copies of Windows XP on the same partition (with features such as System Restore being considered unstable.)

As you should know, Bootstrapping requires an absolute path pointing to an application, even on Linux. If the absolute path on the hard drive changes, the absolute path given in or to the Bootstrap must be changed as well.

Maybe they assumed everybody would use this configuration.
No, they assumed that everybody would not change partitions or hard drives around after the Windows XP installation. This is a fairly reasonable assumption, since modifing partition tables or hard drive configurations implies that you know how to restore operating systems to a workable state if something messes up.

It's also why you see warnings with reparitioning software to backup your harddrive. If something breaks and you don't know how to fix it, then you have something to fall back to.

Re:Not a problem by Luguber123 · 2004-05-23 04:57 · Score: 4, Funny

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 :)

Re:jesus... by anthonyclark · 2004-05-23 05:04 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Runs fine on T40, but hosed "hidden" partition by snopes · 2004-05-23 05:04 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

OK, just use the XP bootloader by Sleepy · 2004-05-23 05:06 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

Not true by Natdog · 2004-05-23 05:15 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Re:Previous Linux partition tables invalid? by antime · 2004-05-23 05:21 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Evil Bug. Simple Fix by ProudClod · 2004-05-23 05:23 · Score: 4, Informative

Right, I was hit by this. I'm a linux newbie. But I solved it.

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 /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda"

You may have to cd to sbin and replace sfdisk with ./sfdisk to make it work. In my case, i had to add the -force flag to the right hand side of the pipe.

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.

Drive geometry fixed if for me by AgelmarJagad · 2004-05-23 05:28 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

Re:No Firewire Either by tuffy · 2004-05-23 05:50 · Score: 5, Informative

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!

From what I remember, not only was Firewire unstable in time for release, but was causing instability even for people without Firewire. I'd rather they held off on including it until it is stable rather than risk data loss by including it prematurely.

--

Ita erat quando hic adveni.

Re:Previous Linux partition tables invalid? by Too+Much+Noise · 2004-05-23 06:29 · Score: 4, Informative

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).

Re:... doesn't like to boot alongside Windows by Waffle+Iron · 2004-05-23 06:30 · Score: 5, Funny

I refuse to associate with zealots of any kind.

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.

Dynamic Disks by thoth · 2004-05-23 07:26 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Re:It seems to me by pyrrhonist · 2004-05-23 09:11 · Score: 3, Informative

It has never worked with any distro to my knowledge. Use partition magic and you should be fine.

It has worked fine for me in every Redhat since 6.0 and every Mandrake since 7.
PartitionMagic has also worked, although there were some issues with PM 7 that repartitioning with DiskDrake solved.

--
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.

Not Fedora. by Nailer · 2004-05-23 10:01 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Now This Bugs Me! by Master+of+Transhuman · 2004-05-23 10:16 · Score: 3, Informative

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!

Ooops, there was supposed to be a hyperlink there by Nailer · 2004-05-23 10:20 · Score: 5, Informative

The fix is here.

VIA C3 Problem by Alan+Cox · 2004-05-23 10:27 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Slashdot Mirror

Fedora Core Doesn't Like to Dual Boot?

59 of 608 comments (clear)