Dual-boot Ubuntu/XP, Replace Ubuntu w/ Fedora

[safetycopy]

Hi All,

I'm still pretty new to Linux. I've been using Ubuntu for a while but have decided to replace it with F9. I'm currently dual-booting Ubuntu and Windows XP Home. My question relates to what I need to do to replace Ubuntu with Fedora as I've heard that messing with GRUB can cause problems booting. Ultimately, I'd like to keep my existing install of XP (on one hard drive), but replace Ubuntu with F9 (on second hard drive). Any advice would be greatly appreciated and please remember I need help in a 'For Dummies' kind of way! :-)

[safetycopy]

Quick update...

I used the MbrFix util to (hopefully) solve the Ubuntu/GRUB related issue. I have F9 installing, BUT... Only one of my hard drives is showing up and it's the one that has Windows on it. I need to install F9 on a separate hard drive that isn't showing up as an option for me to install to. Any ideas?

[glennzo]

Odd that the drive doesn't show as an option. Anything special about it? How many drives does Windows show?

What is the issue that you're having with grub? Could be related to the missing drive.

[safetycopy]

Hi Glennzo - thanks for the reply :-)

I'm not sure what I did, but the 3rd time I tried installing the drive showed up and Anaconda allowed me to install to it. Go figure...

I have two more problems now though.

1) I get no boot menu allowing me to choose between F9 or XP. I suspect this is my fault. When installing F9 I chose to boot it from the hard drive I installed it to (Anaconda queried my initial decision to boot from the hard drive with windows installed on it and that made me nervous so I changed my mind!). My Windows hard drive is first in order as far as booting is concerned - Fedora only boots if I change the hard drive boot order.

2) When Fedora boots I get only a command prompt to login and then the Bash shell... No nice GUI or anything.

I'm positive these problems are all down to something silly I've done, but any help would be greatly appreciated!

Daniel

[glennzo]

You should be able to install grub to the mbr on the Windows drive with no problems. That would require your re-running the rescue mode on the install DVD. I'm reasonably sure that you could also swap the drives permanently and edit the boot menu so that Windows will boot while residing on the second drive.

As for the command prompt only, the system may just be booting to runlevel 3. Check the file /etc/inittab. There is a line that reads id:5:initdefault:.At least it should. If yours is different change it to 5 and reboot. You can also just log in at that command prompt and type startx to make sure it's not a graphics problem.

[safetycopy]

Hi glennzo and thanks again for the reply. I'll give that a go and report back :-)

[safetycopy]

OK, so I re-installed the whole thing, just in case something went wrong first time, and this time set Fedora to boot from my Windows drive.

Installation went fine... Nice GUI and everything...

After successful installation, I reboot and now get a GRUB menu (although it lists Fedora and 'other' rather than explicitly listing 'Windows').

When I select Fedora, I get a bunch of text, with messages along the lines of 'Starting... [OK]'. Towards the bottom of these messages I get something to do with nVidia (I have a GeForce4 MX420 video card) and [FAILED]... It goes too fast for me to read the exact message. At this point I get the root logon and then the bash shell.

After running 'startx' I get this error message:

Fatal server error:
no screens found
giving up.
xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to X server.
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error.

Please remember I'm new to Linux and the CLI in general! :-)

Daniel

P.S. I'm using CD media rather than DVD (don't know if that makes any difference)

[safetycopy]

I forgot to mention - I didn't edit any files as I'm not sure how to from the CLI!

[safetycopy]

I've been trying to do a little more research and came across http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=203190. A lot of the posts were over my head, but I thought I'd try a couple of the commands to try and get some useful info for you to look at.

First off... Once Fedora boots, I get:

Fedora release 9 (Sulphur)
Kernel 2.6.25-14.fc9.i686 on an i686 (tty1)

localhost login:

For the first few seconds the screen flickers a lot, then settles down.

I tried 'system-config-display --reconfig' and got:

Couldn't start X server on card 0
Couldn't start X server on card 1
Error, failed to start X server.

Then I tried 'cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf' and got:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nv"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

I don't know if it's relevant or not, but my motherboard has an onboard Intel graphics chip, and then I have my nVidia GeForce4 MX 420 PCI card. Maybe this is the reason for card0 and card1?

I currently don't have any internet access from Fedora (I'm on a wireless network, which will be next on my list of stuff to get working once I can get the firstboot to work!), so I can't download anything. Obviously, I have internet access from my Windows machine at the moment :-)

[glennzo]

I didn't think a total re-install was necessary, but at least you've got a fresh start. I don't know if we can work with 2 cards here. It may be easier if you go into the bios and disable the on board video. Reboot and let me know what you get. I assume you'll get no GUI and end up with a command prompt.

[safetycopy]

So after spending the entire day messing around with this, something made me unhook the monitor from my nvidia card and hook it directly to the motherboard instead. Guess what? Fedora worked just fine... All the errors I got previously disappeard into the wind!

So... The question now is 'does this mean my video card won't work with Fedora?'

I'm not sure how to disable the onboard graphics in the bios (like I said, I'm new to all this stuff), so I'll look into that and give your suggestion a try. It might have to wait until I've had some sleep though - I don't think I have any more patience today :-(

Don't forget my thread! :-) More soon...

[glennzo]

The nvidia card will probably work but you will have to disable the on-board card. That's done through the bios (del key?) when the system first turns on.

[safetycopy]

Hi glennzo

Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to this - somewhere along the way I screwed something up and couldn't get my monitor working when hooked up to the nVidia card :rolleyes:

Anyway, it's working again now and I THINK I've disabled the onboard graphics... I say THINK because I wasn't able to find an option that explicitly stated 'disable', but I did change primary video adapter from onboard to PCI, so I guess that should be it.

Now, when I boot into Fedora, I log on and go straight to a command prompt just as you thought.

Where to from here?

[glennzo]

You disabled the on-board video properly. I guess more correctly you made it the secondary adapter and the nvidia is now primary.

Open a terminal and type cat /etc/inittab | grep initdefault. You may have to do this as the root user. It should return id:5:initdefault:. If it says id:3:initdefault: then change the 3 to a 5. Do that as root with the command nano /etc/inittab. Nano is a beginner friendly text editor. Save and reboot and see if you get the GUI. If it already says 5 then you need to look elsewhere. Use this command in the terminal as root user, cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep EE. That will list any errors encountered while trying to start the xserver. Post the output here in a reply. I may not be online much longer but someone else can surely step in and take over if need be. If not, then we'll pick up where we left off later. At least you've made some progress tonight.

I'm telling you to open a terminal. Silly me. :rolleyes: You're already at a terminal / command prompt. Log in as root and run the above commands.

[safetycopy]

OK, so 'cat /etc/inittab | grep initdefault' returns:

id:5:initdefault

'cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep EE' returns:

(EE) No devices detected.

[safetycopy]

From what I've gathered, an install of http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_x86_96.43.07.html might help with my problem, so I went ahead and downloaded that and burned it to CD.

After much messing about, I managed to copy the driver file into my user's home/Desktop directory, however, upon running the file as root I get this error message:

ERROR: Unable to find the system utility 'ld'; please make sure you have the package 'binutils' installed. If you do have binutils installed, then please check that 'ld' is in your PATH.

Any idea how I can get the 'binutils' package installed with no internet access from Fedora? I am able to download and burn CDs on a Windows machine, so maybe I can do it that way?

[glennzo]

OK, so 'cat /etc/inittab | grep initdefault' returns:

id:5:initdefault

'cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep EE' returns:

(EE) No devices detected.
id:5:initdefault is what we want to see. Seems that the OS doesn't recognize your video card. What model card is it? You should search the forum for post regarding that specific card and see what others have done to get it working.

[glennzo]

From what I've gathered, an install of http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_x86_96.43.07.html might help with my problem, so I went ahead and downloaded that and burned it to CD.

After much messing about, I managed to copy the driver file into my user's home/Desktop directory, however, upon running the file as root I get this error message:

ERROR: Unable to find the system utility 'ld'; please make sure you have the package 'binutils' installed. If you do have binutils installed, then please check that 'ld' is in your PATH.

Any idea how I can get the 'binutils' package installed with no internet access from Fedora? I am able to download and burn CDs on a Windows machine, so maybe I can do it that way?
I'm reasonably sure that you should use NVidia drivers provided by the kmod packages (kmod-nvidia). As for the binutils package, can you connect the computer to a wired network temporarily and install it? yum install binutils. There are a million threads here on nvidia cards, display issues and the like. Have a look around to see if there are some that are similar to your issues. Use the search function at the top of the page. I'm not bailing out on you but it makes more sense for you to research the issue than it does for me to do it.

[Jubei]

This is strange, I get the same last error. About binutils not being installed (on Fedora 10) but running yum list binutils gives me an output that it's installed, I haven't yet done yum install kmod-nvidia, but I'm not sure it'd be of much help. Anyhow, gonna try fix it, in the meantime, if anyone offers some help it'd be appreciated.
p.s. card --> GeForce 7300 (notebook series)
lappy ------> PB EasyNote

[marcrblevins]

Can you provide us:

su -
lspci

It would show us the video cards you have installed.

[Jubei]

Sorry, I forgot to post that I've fixed it.

For people that have the same problem, here's how I solved it:

rpm -qa | grep rpmfusion

Now check if you have both free and non-free, and make sure they are updated, since there is no current straight download for Fc10. So you download them for Fc8, and just

su -c 'yum update'

Once this is done, just

su -c 'yum install kmod-nvidia'

After that's done, you can either reboot or re-log. Just to reload the graphics.

Then voila. You got your graphics running. :-)

Otherwise about the binutils, I believe that gcc package includes binutils, if not install it, and then you get the amazing error to specify your kernel path. :p

So yeah, thanks for replying, but managed to solve it. :)