XP and Redhat 9 dual boot problem

[web4fun]

Greetings,

I'm experiencing the following error after having loaded Redhat 9.0 on a second/slave HDD and using GRUB to update the MBR..the following occurs upons booting the system,
"GRUB Hard Disk Failure"

I already had Windows XP installed on my primary HDD and during the RH 9 install, I chose to install the GRUB boot loader onto the primary HDD knowing that this would/should overwrite the Windows boot record. However, upon rebooting the system or starting from shutdown, I NEVER get prompted with the menu to chose which OS I'd like to boot from and can only boot from floppy.

I've tried reinstalling grub issuing the grub-install command to the primary HDD but no luck.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. My grub.conf file looks fine compared to what I've seen other folks have posted on other sites. My issue is why don't I ever get the OS menu? And yes, I did see the Windows OS in the screen during my installion as I did have to edit and change "DOS" to "Windows".

Thanks in advance.

 

[jaymzter]

maybe you could try to to manually install grub?

root (hd1,0) <- assuming grub is installed on /dev/hdb1

setup (hd0) <- install to MBR of primary disk

see if that works

 

[web4fun]

jaymzter

thanks for the tip but I already had tried that a couple of times..once during a complete re-install; specifying the primary HDD and then the second time via the grub-install command which executed without error...but I still am having the same issue. I'm wondering if the problem could be related to the fact that XP which is on my primary HDD is NTFS?...I'm thinking no, because as long as RH is installed on a non-NTFS drive (which it is) the MBR should just specify where the boot files are located.

appreciate the suggestion though...I've spent tons of time browsing through various forums and can't seem to get this licked.

 

[dba477]

During install Red Hat as second OS choose "Grab" as loader
and also click advanced installation option.
Doing so you will be prompted where to install loader:
MBR or /deb/hb1 (first partion of slave).
Enforce LBA32 mode (if your first disk > 32 GB)
Put loader on /dev/hb1 and finish up install creating boot
floppy.Don't remove floppy. Reboot machine.Login as root.
$cd /temp (or whatever)
$dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=linux.bin bs=512 count=1
Insert DOS floppy instead of system(Linux Loader)
$mcopy linux.bin a:
Remove DOS floppy from drive.
Reboot to XP
Insert DOS floppy and copy linux.bin to C:Modify boot.ini -
C:\linux.bin="Linux"
Reboot mashine and choose "Linux" option from menu
You are done.

Very simple idea :
Grub should be originally installed into Linux Boot Partion
not MBR.

 

[web4fun]

dba477:

Thanks for the suggestion...after reading some posts on some other forums I was going to revert to using the NTLDR instead. My first issue will be to rebuild the MBR on the primary drive as I can no longer get XP to boot period. I'm hoping that booting from the XP install CD and issue the FIXMBR command will do the trick. Then I'll do a re-install of RH on the slave drive and remember to install the GRUB onto the slave drive and not the primary. Then I'll follow your steps; i.e. editing boot.ini, etc. and go from there. The reason why I had installed the GRUB boot loader onto the primary/master drive was because I had read that it was much easier to deal with vs. the NTLDR but obviously that has not been the case. Thanks again.

 

[BIS]

Ehem...

Someone somewhere mentioned bug # 115980 at

http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla

I would strongly recommend you read that.

 

[web4fun]

BIS:
Thanks but I'm not using GRUB as my bootloader...I got frustrated and am using the Windows bootloader thus I did all of the stuff; ie. running the grub-install command to my slave drive, issuing the 'dd' command to build the linux.bin file and copied over to dos mounted floppy, editing boot.ini in Windows, etc. but now all I get when I attempt to boot RH is a blank screen with the work 'GRUB' in the top left of the screen and nothing. Windows XP boots just fine. If I boot from floppy, RH boots just fine. I'm thinking my problem involves the fact that I read somewhere that if /boot for RH is beyond 1024 sector of the drive, that it can't get to it to boot. If anyone has worked around this, please let me know. Thanks.

 

[dba477]

I guess you forgot "Enforce LBA32" when istalling RH.
The rest was done properly.
You first disk should be more then 32 GB