Cannot boot to Fedora

[vLinuxUser]

I have a Core 2 Duo E6300 PC using Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard. I have 2 160GB harddisk configured as RAID 0.

I partitioned the drive as following:
Partition 1 - 30 GB FAT32 - Primary active - WinXP 64bit installed

The rest of it I partitioned into Extended partitions with 3 Logical partition
Partition 2 - 80 GB - Empty
Partition 3 - 110 GB NTFS - WinXP 64bit installed
Partition 4 - 110 GB NTFS - I use this as data disk

I installed Fedora 6 on partition 2 above and let installation partition it automatically where it will partition the 80 GB partition into the following:
100MB of /boot
The rest will be LVM with 1GB of swap space and the rest root (/).

I went on to install Grub on the first sector of the Linux boot partition so as not to corrupt the MBR.

Installation went fine. Then I boot to winxp and use bootpart to extract the boot info into a file linux.bin and copy it into the C:\. The boot.ini was updated as well by bootpart.

On reboot, the windows boot menu came up and the fedora OS is listed in the menu. I chose it, but the Fedora won't boot. There were some error message saying cannot boot or cannot find operating system (I will capture the error msg next time since I am at work now and don't have access to my home computer).

So what went wrong? Is the problem with the RAID 0 or is it because I must install my Fedora on a primary partition iso a logical one as I have setup above?

I can boot into both WinXP OS without any problem.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

[ajarufe]

Hello, were you able to fix this issue? I am having the same problem.

[Dies]

This is from the Bootpart homepage so maybe this is your problem?

How to add Linux

For Linux, you must install Lilo at the beginning of the Linux partition (as is the case with the OS/2 boot manager) and then add the Linux partition with BootPart:

When you install Linux or run liloconfig, select "Superblock of the root linux partition" as the location for Lilo. On my own Linux box, this added the line "boot=/dev/sdb4" into the file /etc/lilo.conf
__________________________________________________ _________________________________

If you have a floppy drive it's pretty easy to put grub on a floppy just to see if fedora will boot.
I guess installing LILO isn't out of the question either depending on how comfortable you are with that.

But my question to you would be why not use Grub the way it was intended, it's never been a problem for me. And if you decide you don't want it anymore it really couldn't be any easier, I guess I'm just not that concerned with corrupting the mbr since the fix is so easy. You pop in your XP cd choose the recovery console then type fixmbr and then fixboot and you're done.
My other question is do you really have WinXP 64 installed twice or is one of those 32?

[grosminet]

have you installed your partition /boot on the primary harddisk
grub must be on the primary hardisk
you parttion is a little dangerous
if you have your filesystem full, you can reboot
the prudence is to reserve
/
/usr ->8Go
/var-> 5 Go if you have server web and database , you must grown the files system
/home
/tmp
/opt

[Dies]

grosminet brought up a good point I believe your /boot has to be on a primary partition, I didn't realize that when I first read your post. Maybe Gparted can help with this, there is a Live CD you can DL..

[grosminet]

if you use gparted-livecd-0.3.1-1, i think that you can create a little partirion on your primary harddisk for put your boot

[clifweb]

Don't use the default layout in this situations.
This is what I done and worked fine for me:

1st I had Windows XP installed on the primary HDD
2nd I created 2 partion on the second hard drive one for swap and the other for the installation.
3rd I didn't select a partion for the boot loader.
4th I continued with the setup.
5th after Rebooting The boot loader was showed with the options th choose between Fedora 6 and windows xp. The setup installed the boot loader on the primary hard drive.

On my system worked fine immediately without any problems. hope it helps you