Dual boot grub loader woes

[ickyuk]

Hello,

I currently have a PC with hard drives. The primary has Vista already installed, on the secondary I installed fedora9. On installation I selected to have the boot sector of the linux installation on the primary hard drive.

Now when I start the computer, instead of geting grub asking which partion to boot, vista or fedora, it just freezes with the message;

GRUB Loading stage2...

I have put the Vista DVD in and booted from that to hopefully repair the boot sector and start again, however this starts the windows splash screen up and just freezes.

I can boot to the fedora9 live cd that I have, but I am unsure as how to go about editing the GRUB config file, or infact how to access it.

When in the live session, I can see the additional hard drive under /media
and can see the boot sector labelled;

-boot1

From within the live session I can find the /boot1/grub/grub.conf file, however I am unable to edit it as the default session does not have the required priviledges.

Accessing from the terminal I can su to root, but then I'm unable to get to the boot1 directory as using an ls in the /media/ directory the boot directory shows as /-boot1/ which I'm unable to access as it reports the initial -b of the directory name as an argument to the cd command.

At the moment I'm stuck. I've already had to reinstall windows within the last week trying to get this working.

Any and all help would be apprieciated.

[ickyuk]

Update :

Ok I managed to get into the windows recorvery console by booting from the DVD.

Dropping to the command line I "fixed" the mbr using the information provided on the Windows knowledge base.

This has got my Vista working (the Mrs will be happy). But still how can I get a dual boot working from here?

[SD Lead Sponge]

I don't have vista, but I am pretty good at fixing booting problems (given all the stupid things I've done in the past). Be warned that my help may be needlessly complicated.

If you are using the Fedora9 live cd (even if you aren't, the options should be similar), please perform the following steps:

Press an arrow key to abort the automatic boot. Make sure the "Boot" option is selected. Press tab. You'll see some text come up in the middle of the screen saying "vmlinuz0 initrd " and so on. At the very end, add the number three. For example, the last few commands for me would be

liveimg rhgb 3

I only added the 3. Press enter. Let the machine boot until you get a line that reads "localhost login"

Enter the username of "root" (omit the quotes, and there is no password). Type the following command and post the output.

fdisk -l

That is a lowercase "L". Do NOT add anything else to that command. Type it exactly as

fdisk -l

[LenL]

Ickyuk,

As I have said in other posts on this forum. What you want to do before you install FC9 if you are a Windows user and have 2 drives is pull the power off the drive with you Windows OS. Then go into your system BIOS and make sure it boots first to the CD/DVD drive so you can load your FC9 image. Install FC9 to your second drive that does not have WIndows OS. Partition it with enough space for FC9 and anything else you may want to install with FC9. I have found that 40 cylinders is ample. You could get by with much less.....like 20. After you are done installing FC9 you will find that the FC9 boot loader (GRUB) did not touch your Windows OS booting. What you do is shut down your computer and reconnect the power to your drive with Windows (Typically disk 1 your 'C' Drive) go back into bios and change your boot drive to disk 1 and you will boot to Windows OS. When you want to play/use FC9 just press F2 or Delete when booting, go into Bios and change the boot drive to your drive with FC9. After you do this a few times you will find this a VERY easy and simple way to go back and forth between Windows and FC9 and you never have to worry about messing up boot loader booting into Windows OS!

[CraigWatson]

You can use EasyBCD from NeoSmart (free program) to modify the Vista bootmenu - I use this on my desktop machine:

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

It's a fairly simple GUI for the Vista bootloader, and includes GRUB (installed on the Vista partition).

[ickyuk]

Craig, thanks for the tip. I have used EasyBCD before and will try it again.

My only problem now is configuring the damn thing to work properly and create the correct record. I was playing around with it last night but that did not seem to load correctly. The install works as I can boot from the secondary hard drive into Fedora fine. I shall further investigate later tonight and see what I come up with.