[coldtoast]

Hey Guys....

I have just installed Redhat Enterprise 4 on my Windows Xp machine. I installed RH on a seperate 15GB hard drive on the primary slave (with XP installed on a 150GB drive on the primary master). The install went fine, then rebooted as advised, it then came up with the message "GRUB Loading stage2...." and it just hangs there. I tried disabling the primary masterb to force it to boot from the slave, but recieved the message "Missing Operating System". I just disconnected the 15GB drive, and assumed XP would boot now, (assuming my main drive wouldn't have been affected) but recieved the message "GRUB hard drive error".

For the RH install i created one 8GB ext3 partition, and one 1GB swap partition, as advised by my lecturer at uni.

I stupidly did not create an image of my 150GB hard drive......
Do you think i have lost everything on it?

If anyone could be any assistance I would be forever grateful.
Thanks so much in advance......

Coldtoast....

[tsunam]

no you've not lost everything. Just pop in your xp disk and go to the recovery console and type in fix /mbr. It should then allow you to reboot and get back into windows

[coldtoast]

Cool. Thanks alot mate. Cannot try at the moment, but will post the result.

Do you recommend attempting to dual boot with XP and RH E4?
Does it sound as if the RH install was successful. I assume it was as there was no probs during it.....
Is it still possible that both will function?

Thanks again for your prompt reply......

Coldtoast

[coldtoast]

Sorry, obviously it is not the recommended setup to have.....lol. However i do not have the resources to have a linux dedicated machine......

[tsunam]

Its perfectly fine to have both installed together. There's no issue with it. It just appears that grub didn't fully install properly.

[coldtoast]

Thanks alot for your help....

All that was wrong was I was unchecking my main drive when creating the partition on my secondary drive. I was really dubious about it doing anything to my main drive. So when creating the two partitions on my 15GB drive, i unchecked my main drive not knowing that it had to be checked for GRUB to make the link between the two. The XP recovery worked fine as well, i almost shat myself thinking i had lost everything . I also tried creating the MBR (?) on the secondary drive thinking that was the problem, but it still hung at the "GRUB Loading stage2......."

At the end of the day it was just the fact that i was unchecking my main drive when creating the two partitions on my secondary drive, and GRUB couldn't find the link....

Thanks alot for your help guys....... appreciate it......

Coldtoast

[tsunam]

Not a problem what we're here for. Overwriting the mbr won't kill your system..Basically the grub is a boot loader that resides on the mbr (first 512 bytes). So it has to be on your boot selected hard drive..ie the primary with windows. Just have to be careful about what you partition.