WinXP/FC5, always boots WinXP, grub error 21

[jtaylor]

Just noting my problems/solutions for others' benefit:

My home machine has two hard drives, and I recently decided to try FC5 on the second drive. I had two problems. First, I could not get a grub menu after rebooting. The machine would always boot into WinXP as before. The FC5 installation reported no errors. The FC5 installer said it would install grub on /dev/hda, and I verified the installer's advanced grub options were correct. But still grub didn't seem to be installed there after three installation attempts (with different approaches, of course).

A google search recommended I try booting from my first FC5 install disk into linux recue mode, then chroot /mnt/sysimage, then grub-install /dev/hda, but grub-install reported an error message --- so that didn't work for me. Much thanks to this forum, however... one posting recommended grub-install --recheck /dev/hda, and the --recheck flag did the trick. Grub installed fine, first problem solved.

My second problem was on reboot. Grub reported an error 21 message, whatever that is. Again, much thanks to this forum which gave me several more ideas to try. Starting with the simplest suggestion, I verified BIOS settings on my second hard drive. Lo, and behold... I never enabled it in the BIOS. WinXP always found my second hard drive (been using it for years that way), but grub apparently relies on the BIOS for device info, so grub complained (error 21?) that there was no second hard drive. My second hard drive is a secondary slave device, and in the BIOS I set its mode to Auto. Reboot. Everything works fine now.

Perhaps my incomplete installation of my second hard drive (i.e., forgetting to update the BIOS) was the source of both problems. I don't know. I don't care. It works now.

Again, much thanks to this forum.

[Melio]

glad you solved this!

[rajat_ghosh]

Dear Everybody

I have registered just now and would like to say Hello!!! to everybody of this forum.

I have a critical problem with my desktop PC which I could not resolve myself in last couple of days and my computer have become unusable.

I would give my hardware configuration first.
Gigabyte Intel 845GL chipset motherboard
2.4 GHZ Intel pentium 4 processor
2 x 40 GB seagate HDD
AWARD BIOS

I was , prior to Fedora CORE 5 release, using only windows xp installed on my first partition of hdd0(Primary master drive) . My second hard drive is located on secondary master and bootable. To reduce IO contention issues , I have kept all my application softwares on the first partition of secondary master drive. It was like this and worked always without any trouble. Problem began when I did intend to try my downloaded (DVD version) Fedora Core 5 on my machine and the FC5 intaller informed that it needs the primary partition of the first disc . So I did take a full backup of my winXP system with XP backup utility, removed the first partition with xp insatllation cd , formated the second partition of the first drive with NTFS file system,drive letter automatically changed to C: , installed winxp afresh, recovered the backup system with xp bacpup utility, rebooted the system. it worked fine. I was able to work on xp with all previous setting.

Now I did start to install my FC5 on partition 1 and installer moved well and after a while my display freezed. After several reboots and iterating the same process yielded nothing. Then I did try "linux text" mode install and it went all through and the grub bootloader loaded ( on MBR) with automatically detected windows installation where I kept the default boot to WinXP. Installer prompted me a reboot. Post reboot , my system booted directly to winxp and it seemed fedora core is not installed at all . It did not do anything new as many times I have installed FC5 afresh.

So , I did take a complete bootable backup of win xp using nero7 premium backup utility, removed all partition of first drive , recreated partitions afersh, tried fc5 afresh but my system failed to boot. I did use my bootable restore disc , it went well and even restored MBR, but my hard drive could not boot any of the OS and now constantly giving messege
" failed to boot operating system" . I did try to install Win XP afersh with new partitions, it could not be completed after winXP installer intermediate reboot. So I have removed the first Hard drive, moved the second hard drive to the location of the first one, made appropriate bios configuration, formated the first partion of the second drive(now first and only one) , tried to install winxp on it . It also failed the same way. I thought the my bios might be keeping the old values and cleared the CMOS, reconfigured and then tried to install winxp again but it also did not work.

Now both the hard disc is in the same state , even I have tried to install win98 after recreating dos partition with fdisk utility.

It seems that grub is still present in the hard drives and it could not be overwritten by any other OS installation, not even FC5.

I shall be immensely thankful to all of you if you can give me some suggestion to resolve these problem and reuse my hard drives. I have a nero7 bootbale backup of win xp which displays grub booting and restores entire os (sector by sector) of old xp partition image.

[jtaylor]

Well, I'm no expert, but here are my ideas...

You have too many variables at once. Simplify your install to isolate your problem. For starters, forget partitions for now. Just install WinXP on your first drive and install FC5 on your second drive. I found reasonable instructions here. (http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/install-guide/ch-x86-dualboot.html)

If you cannot install WinXP on your first hard drive, your drive is probably installed incorrectly. Double-check the cables. Double-check your BIOS settings. Maybe try installing FC5 on that first hard drive to see if your WinXP install CDs are bad.

While troubleshooting, keep it simple. You'll find your problem much faster.

:)

[rajat_ghosh]

Dear jtaylor

Thank you for your suggestions. Sorry of being late on placing my reply to your post.

Your suggestion worked just well. I have now solved the error. I would like to share the way I have been able to resolve my problem.

The principle problem , I have found out to be and what I did not mention in my earlier problem description is I had used Symentec Partition Magic 7 to reallocate free space in conjunction of XP partition creating utility. That means, I had created all partitions with XP installation cd. Then, using fedora Core , I had converted two partitions to ext3 and swap. Then, while using XP , I had used partition magic to redefine my partitions and merged one partition ( 2gb) with XP system partition. These all actions perhaps made my partition table , a complex one to resolve internally. The second thought is, although I am not sure, partition magic utility does some low level encoding in the hard drives which is normally not removable by redifining partition table and formating the partitions.

Now , How I resolved the situation?? : I have followed your guidelines to isolate my problems.
Firstly, I have used windows 98SE cd to boot into the command prompt and with fdisk utility, I have removed all partitions and did not create any new partition. Then , I have used disk manager utility(Separate software) to install the hdd driver afresh and installed a MBR the Disk manager provides. Rebooted, the system with XP installation cd and created two primary partition each on individual hard drives( I have Two of them) and left the remaining spaces un-allocated. Then I have installed Xp on the primary partition of the master drive. It rebooted smoothly. Cheers!! At Last!!
Then, I have installed the required application softwares on the primary partition on the second drive, took a full backup of my system. Proreeding with the satisfactory and stable boot-up, I have used a bootable partitioning utility called Gparted( a linux utility) and created another two primary partition(one with ext3 file format and another is a linux-swap) from the unallocated space on my master drive, the created the extended partition and defined other logical drives. On second hard drive , I have placed another primary partition ( as I plan to install windows server 2003) and rest as extended partition with logical drives defined. With a clean reboot, I have proceeded to install Windows Server 2003 . It worked fine and MBR updated, both the OS is bootable individually.
Now I have installed Fedora Core 5 on the ext3 partition( I have created earlier) and installed grub bootloader on MBR. Rebooted the system , grub spalsh screen appeared with two options of booting , one for linux othe for two Windows installation. Eureka!!!!!
All os is individually bootable.

Now I have a small problem and that is : on fedora core 5 booting option it takes me to a command prompt ( Shell) with login option where I can login as root user but could do anything better because I am a novice in linux and does not know how to start the graphical interface, create user and configure the kernel so that it automatically boots to x-window system and allows me to login to kde or genome desktop. If you could suggest something, it will be a immense help.

Thanking you once again for your suggestions.

Regards

Rajat Ghosh

[jtaylor]

...
Now I have a small problem and that is : on fedora core 5 booting option it takes me to a command prompt ( Shell) with login option where I can login as root user but could do anything better because I am a novice in linux and does not know how to start the graphical interface, create user and configure the kernel so that it automatically boots to x-window system and allows me to login to kde or genome desktop. If you could suggest something, it will be a immense help.


I don't know.

Reposting your question in a new thread with a better subject line will expose your problem to a greater number of people.

[Rabbiddog]

Rajat, I had many issues trying to install and boot XP/Fedora from two seperate drives (XP on one drive and Fedora on a secondary). The following post what extremely helpful in getting this resolved. Let me know if it helps you.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=975&highlight=dual+boot