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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."
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
You got to know someone at M$ is pissed they never thought of it before.
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.
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>
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The fix is here.