[sidargo]

Hello everyone,

this is my first post here and probably not my last

I recently came to hate WindowsXP because of some severe problems... we are talking severe worm problems here, since I am no Sasser.. um... Sissy... you get the idea

Before I ask my question, let me please use this opportunity to introduce myself (if you have "no time for this crap", feel free to scroll down and simply anwer my question ):

My name is Sebastian Schneider, I am a 25-year-old from Kreuztal, Germany. I am currently learning to be a computer professional in the field of application development (in German: Azubi Fachinformatiker Anwendungsentwicklung) and a trainee in a company which manufactures steel plants and rolling mills. We have an IT-department and I am very glad to have received this opportunity, as it is not easy to find a trainee-job (Ausbildungsplatz) here, especially at my age (I was 23 when I started).

My hobbies (in no particular order):
I am a volunteer firefighter at the local fire department (www.feuerwehr.kreuztal.de), I read a lot (books and magazines, in both German and English), I play games on my antique Super-NES (it might be called Super-Famicom where you live), Playstation 1 and PC and I love to bike around the local area, when I am not busy with any of the previous hobbies

Oh, and of course, I spend a lot of my time "playing" with my computer - testing OS'es, Programs and stuff.


--- Description of circumstances ---

Well, I MAY hate WindowsXP - but nontheless, I have used it for a long time and it took quite some time to find a replacement that would be both easy to install and secure to use. I first thought Solaris would be cool, but I can not afford it. So my options were to trade my computer for a used Mac or to get a free OS. As both of my local Macintosh retailers refused to give me the Mac first in order to be able to transfer my data (80 GB of documents, videos and pictures), I was stuck with the last option.

After asking a few friends and co-workers, I opted for Fedora Core 2. I installed it and payed no attention to the Warning Message (I am a "pro", remember ... ) that stated something was wrong with my disk geometry.

--- Problem Description ---

Installation of Fedora was on hdb, Windows is on hda, I installed GRUB to the MBR.

After this, I rebooted my computer - and I cannot boot Windows XP anymore. This kinda sounded all my alarms and I removed the /hda entries from my fstab in order to avoid further damage and find some help.

I found a thread in this forum which exactly described my problem (i forgot to bookmark it though, and have lost the link) and was about to follow the steps described in an official document (another lost link, but saved to a usb-harddisk) when it occured to me that the tool "SFDISK" used to implement the solution was not included with my FC2 installation. So I thought I could use the rescue disk, but there is a problem: I cannot mount the USB-drive somehow. It is not recognized, there is no /etc/fstab on the rescue system and /etc/mtab is write only

Apparently, the system automounted hda though... and this is where my question comes:

Is is safe to save the text file with the solution to hda6 (OEM made this partition, which is FAT32 and contains "Recovery Tools" (all designed to run in Windows or DOS, though) in order to be able to access (and read) it from the Rescue System? Or will I be damaging my hda? I REALLY need some of the data on that disk, and I would hate to lose it.

Thanks in advance
Sebastian (aka sidargo)

[tsunam]

Guten Tag, Willkommen zu diem Brettern (I hope this is correct ^.^;; been about 6 years since i used my german)

For the grub issue, could you please post the information for each loader of the grub

efault 0
timeout 30
title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.6
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda3
title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.4
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/2.6 root=/dev/hda3

should look something like that...thats the info that we need, so we can perhaps debug at least part of the problem with grub (I've known with fedora 2 theres sometimes a error in how it does automatic grub windows xp boot config)

It is also perfectly safe to write to a fat32 filesystem. However you do not want to write to a NTFS system under any circumstances

[sidargo]

Thanks for the reply.

--- begin /etc/grub.conf ---

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd1,0)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hdb2
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Fedora Core (2.6.5-1.358)
        root (hd1,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
        initrd /initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img
title Other
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1

--- end /etc/grub.conf ---

edit: "... diesem Forum" - and if I make some mistake, please correct me as well

[tsunam]

try this for the windows partition instead of other

title WindowsXP
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

for some reason, a lot of times that makeactive seems to fix the boot load problems. I'm not sure entirely the reason...it shouldn't matter...but it does

[Topazz]

I also got caught by that bug and ended up reformatting my hard drive and then installing FC2 on its own hard drive. Hopefully you won't have to do the same.

Some pages that may prove useful are here:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedor.../msg02114.html

http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=183558


Please consult with tsunam before attempting any of the fixes suggested there. Some of them did not work for me, but I had already done some damage trying to fix the problem prior to discovering those pages.

[Squashman]

Was this the link you were talking about.
http://forums.techguy.org/t237469.html

Look at this as well.
http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/fc2.html

[sidargo]

Holla.

Yes, squashman, that was the link I was talking about.

I tried tsunam's hint (adding makeactive), but it did not help.

The "official" RedHat solution worked, however:

Rescue Mode (using Rescue CD)
check the output of "sfdisk -d /dev/hda" for any warnings. If necessary, pipe to text-file and manually remove warnings.
Pipe that file or the direct output to "sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda.

In my case, "sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda" did the job quite fine. I am writing this under WinXP.

Additionally, I have switched my Bios to LBA for my Harddisks.

A hint if someone is looking for this option: On some systems, you have to hit enter while the harddisk is selected in order to get into the "detail menu".

Cheers and thanks,
problem solved

Sebastian

[tsunam]

glad it worked out and found a soltion that will keep you from havint to format.