Installed Fedora, but lost vista and can't restore, HELP

[Emailzac]

So i'm VERY new at this, i need fedora for this research i'm starting. I have a dell and vista was installed on it, then i installed fedora 10 like it said on the fedora site from a boot disc. Now i have fedora but i don't have vista nor access to the memory it took up. I tried to restore to start over but i can't, and i need vista back.

Normally i would restore from the 10 G partition dell sets up for recovery but i'm not able to get to it, and i don't have my vista discs they're back at school.

What do i do?

[Dangermouse]

Hi and welcome,
did you shrink the vista partition and install fedora into the free space

[Emailzac]

yes exactly

[Emailzac]

Originally Posted by Dangermouse

Hi and welcome,
did you shrink the vista partition and install fedora into the free space

yes exactly

[Dangermouse]

Hi if you type in a terminal and post the output back here

su
fdisk -l

it should be just a matter of changing grub as it probably picked up the recovery partition as the windows.

[Emailzac]

[Zac2@zacf ~]$ su
Password:
[root@zacf Zac2]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x48000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 7 56196 de Dell Utility
/dev/sda2 8 1313 10485760 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 * 1313 9557 66218996 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 9558 12161 20916630 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 9558 9583 208813+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 9584 12161 20707753+ 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe4bbcec2

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 19457 156288321 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

Disk /dev/sdc: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x5b6ac646

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 19457 156288321 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
[root@zacf Zac2]#

[Dangermouse]

Ok if i have this right, if you edit /boot/grub/menu.lst

su
gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

you should have a part something like below in it
title Other
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

change it like below a 0 to 1
title Other
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

save and try reboot to other(vista) now.

[Emailzac]

Originally Posted by Dangermouse

Ok if i have this right, if you edit /boot/grub/menu.lst


you should have a part something like below in it
title Other
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

change it like below a 0 to 1
title Other
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

save and try reboot to other(vista) now.

it says

rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

I'm changed to look like the one you got. it still tells me

BOOTMGR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+D...

[Dangermouse]

if it was already hd0,1 change it to hd0,0 try that

If it doesnt work try 2 (which it could well be)

[Emailzac]

TOTALLY WORKED!! your totally my hero man, thanks. So what did i do wrong and why did that fix it? i had to use 2

[sidebrnz]

When you installed Fedora, it thought that the first partition on your hard disk was Vista, but it wasn't, and you had to change it to the right one. Looking at the results from fdisk, I can see (and Dangermouse didn't notice) that the third partition (hd0,2 to grub) is the right one, because it's the one marked as bootable. The reason this happens is that OEMs put the recovery partition first, so that the rest of the drive can be partitioned as one big drive, but Fedora expects the very first partition to be the one with your other system. Keep this in mind, because when F11 comes out, you may want to reinstall, and you'll know how to avoid this by selecting the right partition during installation.