An easy question for most of you...

[darkman088]

Hi everybody...

Very briefly... I am in the progress of installing all the latest stuff to my laptop. I've installed Windows 7 just a few days ago. Now it's turn for Fedora 14. Both are 64 bit.
I have my own practice (which worked very well till now with XP and Win2k) to install the boot loader in the first sections of the Linux partition and mark it as boot. I prefer to leave the MBR untouched. And all was fine...
Today - 2 hours wasted in Fedora installation and... What was my surprise, when after the reboot, my laptop booted again into Windows 7 without any GRUB or menu or nothing...
I have set the active partition to be Fedora's partition (with GPartEd live CD) and after the reboot - No OS found...
Now I'm trying to rebuild GRUB, without a breakthrough...
Could please somebody help me and write me the exact procedure? What do I need to reinstall, GRUB or GRUB 2? Or maybe the whole Fedora?!?
My disk layout is:
1 partition - the Windows 7 system boot partition (100 MB)
2 partition - Windows 7 itself
3 partition - Data
4 partition - Fedora 14.

I didn't create a swap partition (I wanted but there was an issue, not important for now).

Thanks a lot in advance!! A quick response would be really veeery highly appreciated!!

[stoat]

IMO, your usual boot loader scheme should have worked this time, too. One possible explanation for it not working is that the Fedora 14 partition is a logical partition. Those can be marked active. And Anaconda usually will mark the Fedora boot partition as active even if it is a logical partition. But logical partitions cannot actually function as real active partitions, and when marked active (or "boot) will not be found by MS-type bootstrapping code in the MBR. It can find only primary active partitions.

If that speculation turns out to be true, then consider configuring the Windows 7 boot loader to boot Fedora. The free and popular utility known as EasyBCD can simplify that job. It would be another way to boot Fedora and not do anything to the master boot record. It's easy to find with Google, and there are guides and tutorials there, too.

[jj97403]

You could try running anaconda and choose replace existing linux partitions with current install and leave pother partitions OS's alone.

It is like the third choice when choose install/partition type at the beginning, and definitely NOT TO BE CONFUSED with the choice that says to erase all partitions and install linux on the whole hard drive.

[DBelton]

Since you chose to install grub into the Fedora partition, it left the MBR alone and is using the Windows 7 bootloader. To boot Fedora, you have to add it to the Windows bootloader.

There is a Windows 7 application called EasyBCD that makes adding other OS's to the bootloader a fairly simple process.

It can be downloaded from here:
http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

When you add the new OS using that application, you just select the a new entry, click the linux tab, type will be grub legacy, and device is the partition that you installed Fedora into.


Edit: noticed that stoat already gave you this same information. :D

[darkman088]

Thanks, guys!!

You are great! I just did a little different way...
I've downloaded the super GRUB bootable CD (only 4 MB) and it did it for me perfectly!!