booting Fedora 3 from boot disk

[Phil Schaffner]

On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 16:27 -0500, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> 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.
...
> >
> >> 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.)

That can work too, and have done it that way, but still prefer grub on
the MBR - with another bootable medium as backup to recover from Bill
Gates or others of evil intent clobbering it. :-)

...
> >> 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.

Will that work with FC3 on /dev/hdb?  Thought he would need /boot to be
on /dev/hdaX, rather than /dev/hdbY as is apparently the case, or might
have suggested that approach.

Phil