Fedora 2 and Win XP dual boot bug

[Sean Estabrooks]

On Wed, 26 May 2004 10:55:09 +0200 (METDST)
Adam Antoniak <antonim at panda.bg.univ.gda.pl> wrote:

> Hi guys,
> I've been following this list for a while and know you guys rock. I made a
> fresh install of Fedora Core 2 yesterday and put GRUB into MBR (did it
> when installing Fedora 1 and experienced no problem) and experienced the
> well known bug. I'm not able to boot my XP anymore as the GRUB stops at
> 'chainloader +1'. I'm sure my ntfs Windows partition is ok as I can
> access if from Fedora 2 (it works like a dream by the way).I googled for
> about an hour and found several suggestions to solve the problem. I'm
> curious of your opinion. Any commonly accepted fix? Looks like the problem
> with partition table and needless to say I'm unwiling to play with it
> unless it is really neccessary (loosing 40Gb of data in case
> something goest wrong doesn't sound good to me).

Hi Adam,

The easiest solution if it's supported by your computer is to change
the setting of your disk to LBA mode in the BIOS.   If that isn't an
option for your computer then you can boot into Fedora and try
a command like:

# sfdisk -d | sfdisk -H255 -f  -N1 /dev/hda

Where the number given for the -N paramter (1 in the example)
should be the NTFS partition number.   You can actually just leave
off the -N parameter all together and all the partitions will be updated.

Make sure you backup your current partition table first:

dd bs=512 count=1 if=/dev/hda of=/boot/boot.sect.orig

Make sure you have CD1 or your DVD around so that you can boot
into rescue mode and mount your disk in the worst case Fedora
isn't bootable afterward  (highly unlikely).

There are some other ways to go about the fix mentioned in 
bugzilla:

http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=116653

http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=115980

Good Luck,
Sean