booting Fedora 3 from boot disk

[Paul Howarth]

On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 16:46 -0500, Phil Schaffner wrote:
> 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. :-)

If you use the NT/2000/XP bootloader, a subsequent install of another
version of NT/2000/XP will update the bootloader rather than clobber it,
and the entry for booting Linux will stay intact.

> ...
> > >> 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.

Bootpart (http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm) is a tool you can use
under Windows to configure the Windows bootloader to add an entry to
chain-load another bootloader (e.g. grub) from another partition. I use
it fairly regularly and it's very convenient.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>