booting Fedora 3 from boot disk

[Phil Schaffner]

On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 15:56 -0500, Gentian Hila wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I installed fedora 3 on my machine which has a windows xp in it as
> well. I installed GRUB as the boot loader not in MBR but in Fedora
> partition.

Seems to be grub day today.

> Strangely enough, (very different from FC1 and previous RedHat
> versions), fedora did not ask me to create a boot disk.

Current kernels are too big for a floppy - as you apparently already
learned from comment below.

> So I cannot boot to fedora. I do not want to install GRUB on MBR.

Why not?  That seems like the cleanest solution.

> I
> tried to enter in linux rescue mode and create a bootdisk through
> mkbootdisk but it didnt work since the system is mounted in
> /mnt/sysimage and the kernel is looked up in /lib/modules.

Did you do "# chroot /mnt/sysimage"?


> I tried to create a floppy boot disk in another machine that had FC3
> but it was bigger that a floppy, so then I created a CD boot disk
> through mkbootdisk.
> 
> Now when I used that boot cd I typed linux
> root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 (this is weird because fedora 1 was on
> /dev/hdc5 which I tried without success as well)  because there it
> says that Fedora is installed, but for some reason it fails to mount
> the system.
> 
> It says:
> 
> mount: error 6 mounting ext3
> mount: error 2 mounting none
> switchroot: mount failed 22
> unmount  .initrd/dev failed 2
> Kernel panic - not syncing Attempted to kill init. !

The iso boot image probably has an inappropriate initrd.

> 
> How can I start Fedora 3 ? How can I create a cd or whatever to make it work ?
> 
> Please help as I am completely stuck ......

As discussed in recent "Re: Grub loading stage2 error" thread - you need
to get the windows bootloader to chain to grub on the boot partition if
you don't want to use GRUB in the MBR.  I have no experience doing it,
but know it is possible.

Phil