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Fedora Core Doesn't Like to Dual Boot? 608

Posted by CmdrTaco from the nobody-noticed-that? dept.
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."
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Fedora Core Doesn't Like to Dual Boot? More

Fedora Core Doesn't Like to Dual Boot?

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  • Now (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:28AM (#9230500)
    if this was a Microsoft problem the amount of bitching and conspiracy theories would never end. Lets see how it plays out.

    • Not comparable (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:31AM (#9230530)
      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 (Score:3, Insightful)

        by DougJohnson ( 595893 )
        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 f
        • 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 Lin

        • Re:Not comparable (Score:5, Informative)

          by bob65 ( 590395 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @01:30PM (#9231493)
          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 (Score:5, Interesting)

            by pr0c ( 604875 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @02:06PM (#9231838)
            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 (Score:3, Insightful)

              by jrockway ( 229604 ) *
              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.

              • Re:Not comparable (Score:4, Interesting)

                by pr0c ( 604875 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @04:25PM (#9232691)
                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..).

              • Not Fedora. (Score:5, Informative)

                by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @05:01PM (#9232898)
                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.

        • Re:Not comparable (Score:4, Interesting)

          by antirename ( 556799 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @03:48PM (#9232465)
          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 (Score:5, Funny)

        by Luguber123 ( 203502 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:02PM (#9230878) Homepage
        In the Microsoft world this would be considered a feature.

    • Re:Now (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lazy_arabica ( 750133 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:34AM (#9230580) Homepage
      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 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by EpsCylonB ( 307640 ) <.moc.bnolycspe. .ta. .spe.> on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:36AM (#9230613) Homepage
      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 (Score:5, Informative)

        by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:43AM (#9230695)
        well it was first reported in Feb so oviously they are in no great hurry to fix it.

    • Re:Now (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tolan-b ( 230077 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:36AM (#9230615)
      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 (Score:5, Informative)

        by DJStealth ( 103231 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:00PM (#9230851)
        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 (Score:3, Interesting)

        by schotty ( 519567 )
        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 LB

    • Re:Now (Score:5, Interesting)

      by akeru ( 15942 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:38AM (#9230646)
      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.
      • Acording the thread in the link, it is actuelly Fedore that mess with the partition table.

        • Re:Now (Score:5, Informative)

          by akeru ( 15942 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:55AM (#9230812)
          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.

          • Re:Now (Score:4, Insightful)

            by EvilAlien ( 133134 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:57PM (#9231275) Journal
            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?

      • Re:Now (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Graftweed ( 742763 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:11PM (#9230941)
        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 (Score:5, Insightful)

          by gwalla ( 130286 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @02:22PM (#9231940) Homepage
          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.

      • Re:Now (Score:5, Informative)

        by bob65 ( 590395 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @01:25PM (#9231456)
        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 (Score:5, Funny)

      by Senjutsu ( 614542 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:06PM (#9230904)
      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>

  • ... doesn't like to boot alongside Windows (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:28AM (#9230502)
    Well who would?
    • 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.

  • W2K3? (Score:4, Informative)

    by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:28AM (#9230503) Homepage Journal
    Works fine here with Windows Server 2003.

  • IF it boots at all! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lispy ( 136512 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:33AM (#9230554) Homepage
    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.

  • Caused by extra kernel patches? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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?

  • Some hints for safe partitioning (Score:4, Informative)

    by ultrabot ( 200914 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:34AM (#9230576)
    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.

  • its a hardware problem (Score:5, Informative)

    by ozzy_cow ( 453986 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:35AM (#9230597)
    Copy and paste from here [fedoranews.org]


    It turns out that the bug (#115980) [redhat.com] 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 (Score:5, Funny)

      by Epistax ( 544591 ) <epistax AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:56AM (#9230825) Journal
      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.
    • 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.
      • it has to do with the logical block adressing. if you are using any large drive you should be using that instead of chs. I forget the size, but large drives can't actually be possible under chs. there is a value limit that makes it limited to a certain size.

        Lba will allow the chs of the drive be translated to another value in the bios giving it the ability to adress larger drives. one thing that is strange about lba is that it is stored in the boot sector of the partition and is dynamicaly created by the
      • Heh. Other way here. Auto was using LBA and changing manually to CHS fixed it.
  • I just upgraded two boxen, one via search+replace 1 by 2 in my /etc/apt/sources.list and an "apt0get update; apt-get dist-upgrade", the other via booting from the DVD and picking 'enter'. Both updates were very smooth, even tho I expected troubles with my proprietary NVIDIA drivers and Xorg. However, both boxes had FC1 installed before.

    Cheers.

  • The Fedora says: (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:36AM (#9230601)
    All your partition are belong to us!
  • I don't run fedora so i cant speak from experience, but what about using one of those 3rd party boot loaders like GAG or XOSL?

  • Since Feburary?! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by koniosis ( 657156 )
    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.

  • Mandrake also (Score:5, Informative)

    by cyphr555 ( 696516 ) <cyphr555@noSpaM.hotmail.com> on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:37AM (#9230625)
    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.

  • Way Too Buggy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ed Almos ( 584864 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:38AM (#9230630)
    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

    • VIA C3 Problem (Score:5, Informative)

      by Alan Cox ( 27532 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @05:27PM (#9233038) Homepage
      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.
  • 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.
    • I'll tell you why this happened.

      Nobody bothered to test parted with the 2.6 kernel AND on various BIOS and HD geometries to see if it worked right. Which is not too surprising considering how much testing that would have entailed on Red Hat's part. The parted people, however, should have done it. Apparently they didn't.

      Given that parted has screwed up before, this is not surprising.

      Lessons learned: don't use parted for partitioning.

  • Here's your trouble... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MsGeek ( 162936 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:42AM (#9230685) Homepage Journal
    This article has more info:
    http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/pipermail/linux- thinkpad/2004-May/017754.html [linux-thinkpad.org]

    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.

  • Use Separate Disks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Blarfy_Snarflepoop ( 541822 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:44AM (#9230704)
    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:Use Separate Disks (Score:5, Informative)

      by Pros_n_Cons ( 535669 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:35PM (#9231125)
      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 [mpeters.us] It doesn't work for everyone but if it does, problems like this wont happen again.

  • Related issue (Score:3, Informative)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:45AM (#9230714) Homepage Journal
    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 [livejournal.com] on this issue.

  • Envy (Score:5, Funny)

    by WinterpegCanuck ( 731998 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:47AM (#9230735)
    You got to know someone at M$ is pissed they never thought of it before.
  • I have FC2 installed on two machines, an Athlon XP 2500+ with a WDC WD800JB, and a K62 500 with an older Hitachi. Both worked great dual booting, one with WinXP/FC2 the other with FreeBSD 5.2.1/FC2

    The only problem I had has been mentioned before, and that is with the X drivers for the Radeon 9600SE ...but ATIs proprietary ones fixed that.
  • for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction...

    While MS has set out to intentionally make using competitors software difficult to install and use along side windows, if not in digital reality then certainly in mental reality.... .... is it any wonder that consumer training by MS has lead to such bad habits as to result in the stated problem?

    live by the s-word/code....and die by it....

  • ...Could it be this problem? (Score:4, Informative)

    by orzetto ( 545509 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @11:49AM (#9230760)

    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.

    • MOD PARENT UP! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jjohnson ( 62583 )
      This fixed my problem exactly: I have a SCSI and an IDE drive, with FC2 on the SCSI, and WXP on the IDE; the BIOS boots the SCSI first, and grub is on the MBR of the SCSI. When Windows was selected, it would hang, displaying
      rootnoverify (hd1,0)
      chainloader +1
      I put the parent's code into grub.conf, and it booted correctly.

    • Re:...Could it be this problem? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sigma 7 ( 266129 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:50PM (#9231227)
      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.
  • The difference between "it will by the deadline" and "it will be released when its ready".
  • Since I installed Windows 2K on top of Fedora, Linux doesn't boot up. I had Suse and Mandrake on the same disk also. Maybe Windows doesn't like to dual boot either? Is this a bug and should I report this to MS?

    Or is this some sort of Windows "special feature?"

  • Runs fine on T40, but hosed "hidden" partition (Score:4, Interesting)

    by snopes ( 27370 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:04PM (#9230896) Journal
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sleepy ( 4551 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:06PM (#9230908) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Natdog ( 571027 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:15PM (#9230956) Homepage
    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.

  • Evil Bug. Simple Fix (Score:5, Informative)

    by ProudClod ( 752352 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:23PM (#9231024)
    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.

  • No Firewire Either (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Perl-Pusher ( 555592 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:38PM (#9231141)
    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!

    • Re:No Firewire Either (Score:5, Informative)

      by tuffy ( 10202 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:50PM (#9231232) Homepage Journal
      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.

  • Worked for me (Score:3, Informative)

    by jjohnson ( 62583 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @01:10PM (#9231360) Homepage
    I've been following this problem for a while, so it was with a diaper firmly taped in place that I installed FC2 on my laptop, a Dell Latitude D600 with a 30GB HD, with the following partition table:
    HD1 Fat32 30MBs
    HD2 NTFS 20GBs (Windows XP)
    HD3 /boot 200MBs
    HD4 extended
    HD5 / 9GBs
    HD6 swap 1GB
    My read on the problem is that there's a combination of factors having to do with changes to HDs plus changes to the 2.6 kernel plus Windows XPs non-standard way of handling HD geometry. Put those together and you might hose your partition in a fixable or non-fixable way, depending on which conditions are present.

    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.

  • Dynamic Disks (Score:5, Informative)

    by thoth ( 7907 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @02:26PM (#9231977) Journal
    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.

  • I have an idea... (Score:3, Funny)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @04:57PM (#9232878)
    The solution is easy. Instead of bothering to fix the software responsible for the problem, they should create a boot disk that drops you into a command prompt, where you can type, in hexadecimal notation, the code required to boot Windows on whatever partition it resides. Then, supply people with a sheet of paper that shows them exactly what to type, and make sure the command prompt supports only the 'x', numeric, and 'enter' keys. No backspace/delete or editing functionality is needed. That way, if you make a single mistake, say, on the very last line, you have to reboot and start over.

    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.

  • Now This Bugs Me! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Master of Transhuman ( 597628 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @05:16PM (#9232973) Homepage
    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.

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