booting Fedora 3 from boot disk

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Phil Schaffner wrote:

> 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.

Actually, my favorite arrangement for dual-boot machines is to install 
grub in /boot and make /boot active with fdisk.  That way, overwriting the 
MBR doesn't screw things up like this.  (If you do reinstall Windows, you 
still have to re-mark the /boot partition active, though.)

>
>> 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.

There was antoehr thread recently about how to get rescue to see the LVM 
filesystems.  Check the archives at mailman.redhat.com or at gmane.com.

>
>>
>> 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.

Or install GRUB in /boot's boot record and just make it the active 
partition.  This is easy to do during installation, but a bit trickier 
after the fact.  (Making the partition active still has to be done with 
fdisk after the first time you install, but not after subsequent installs 
if you use the same boot partition).  The grub info pages have what you 
need, but they take some patience and persistence to read through.

>
> Phil
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs