Configurin GRUB or Installin LiLO

[James Wilkinson]

Phil Schaffner wrote:
> Did you perhaps add the disk on which you installed Fedora as master and
> move the original XP disk to be the secondary disk? If so, you will
> need to fool XP into thinking it is still on the first disk.

zaca1 at click21.com.br replied:
> That?s it! The WinXP hard disk is slave (hdb) of Fedora hard disk(hda).

But was the primary when it was installed?

> I?ll try to make the changes you wrote. 
> I have read about "hard disk geometry as reported in the partition table
> to be altered during installation". Do you think it's the problem?

Um. Moving Windows' boot disk is quite enough to get it confused,
without partition table changes.

You can test that out by temporarily moving the XP hard disk back to
primary.

Unfortunately, I've never found a way of reconciling Windows to a new
location. In some places, it refers to partitions by disk number and
partition number, and the data gets written into the Registry, and it
all gets horribly complicated and undocumented.

Personally, I'd want to put the Windows disc as primary, leave the
WinXP boot sector on the partition boot sector, and either put grub
on the master boot sector (which it does automatically), or boot grub
from the Windows boot menu, following the instructions at
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+NT-Loader.html .  Despite the age of this
HOWTO, and the fact it talks about lilo, not grub, it's all still
valid (last I tried) in spirit: you install grub on the boot sector of
one of the Linux partitions.

Incidentally, you can quite happily have a FAT32 partition mounted as
/boot : Linux and Windows will get to see each other's files, but they
won't overlap (until the day Windows gets a new kernel named
vmlinuz... :-) ).

HTH,

James.

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