Fedora 12 and Vista Dual Boot Troubles

[gladders]

Dear All,

I am unable to run both F12 and Vista as a dual boot system, and would love to know if anyone has managed to do so as it is driving me mad trying to find a way of doing it!

I have been running older versions of Fedora and Vista sucessfully for a couple of years as a dual boot on the same hard drive and decided to upgrade to F12 over Christmas.

Fedora 12 is great. It does everything I want smoothly and without problems (congratulations guys!). However, after a couple of weeks enjoying my new Linux experiance, when I returned to work after the break I needed to run Vista (a company I work for have an accounting package that I need access to that won't run under wine), and when I selected Vista from the Grub menu (I believe the settings are correct) and Vista returns a message saying BOOTMGR is missing.

It seems to me that the F12 installation has removed it. BOOTMGR missing seems to be quite a common problem with Vista if you play around with the partitians and the suggested fix of running the Vista DVD and selecting the repair option doesn't fix the problem. In fact, the Vista DVD doesn't even find a valid Vista installation at all.

Obviously, the Fedora installation works fine and when I mount the NFTS Vista drive it is all present and correct.

I have tried installing Vista first, F12 first, partitianing in Vista and in Fedora, a different Vista install DVD, re writing the Grub config all to no avail.

So I therefore wondered if anyone has had a similar problem and fixed it, and if not, has anyone got any ideas for a work around or a different approach that might get somewhere?

I can post any details required but thought I'd try to keep the tech to a minimum to start with.

Thanks very much for any help, I think I'm rapidly going insane trying to sort this!

Gladders

[glennzo]

Boot into Fedora and have a look at /boot/grub/grub.conf. In the Windows (or Other) section if you see root (hd0,0) try changing that to root (hd0,1). This is assuming the typical computer with a restore partition on /dev/sda1 (hd0,0) and Windows on /dev/sda2 (hd0,1). Seems to be an extremely common installer error.

[pabloguevara]

I have a similar issue with my setup. I first was not going to install Windows on this PC, but later I had to. Now I can not boot my Windows partition.

My FC12 on /dev/sda1 boots fine
My Windows XP on /dev/sda4 does not boot, I get BOOTMGR error, and it requests me to reboot...

My fdisk config

bash-4.0$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for pablo: 

Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000c6fcc

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        3187    25599546   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            3188        3697     4096575   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3            3698       21482   142858012+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4           21483       30401    71641867+   7  HPFS/NTFS

And my grub config

bash-4.0$ sudo cat /boot/grub/grub.conf
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You do not have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
#          root (hd0,0)
#          kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/sda1
#          initrd /boot/initrd-[generic-]version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=15
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.32.12-115.fc12.i686.PAE)
	root (hd0,0)
	kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32.12-115.fc12.i686.PAE ro root=UUID=a9867c9d-e71c-4059-9aca-4d9e19798290  LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rhgb quiet
	initrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.32.12-115.fc12.i686.PAE.img
title Fedora (2.6.32.12-115.fc12.i686)
	root (hd0,0)
	kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32.12-115.fc12.i686 ro root=UUID=a9867c9d-e71c-4059-9aca-4d9e19798290  LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rhgb quiet
	initrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.32.12-115.fc12.i686.img
title Fedora (2.6.32.11-99.fc12.i686)
	root (hd0,0)
	kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32.11-99.fc12.i686 ro root=UUID=a9867c9d-e71c-4059-9aca-4d9e19798290  LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rhgb quiet
	initrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.32.11-99.fc12.i686.img
title Fedora (2.6.32.11-99.fc12.i686.PAE)
	root (hd0,0)
	kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32.11-99.fc12.i686.PAE ro root=UUID=a9867c9d-e71c-4059-9aca-4d9e19798290  LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 KEYBOARDTYPE=pc KEYTABLE=us rhgb quiet
	initrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.32.11-99.fc12.i686.PAE.img
title Windows
	rootnoverify (hd0,3)
	chainloader +1

Any idea what could be wrong?

[stoat]

Originally Posted by pabloguevara

Any idea what could be wrong?

Hello pabloguevara,

For now, it might be more expedient to approach the matter this way... There are only two possibilities, and you've already tried one. So try the other...

title Windows
	rootnoverify (hd0,2)
	chainloader +1

Sometimes, the boot loader files for a Windows system are not in the same partition as the system itself. Anyway, it won't hurt anything to try it.

[pabloguevara]

stoat, good tip thanks. It worked.
It's very anoing, even though you tell windows which partition you want to user for installation, it will still modify another partition.

Now i will try to copy the necesary files so that Windows boots from /dev/sda4 (hd0,3)... but my Windows is working now!

[pabloguevara]

These are all the files needed to boot Win XP

NTLDR - Root directory of the startup disk
Boot.ini - Root directory of the startup disk
Bootsect.dos - Root directory of the startup disk (this is win boot utility, no required if using grub)
Ntdetect.com - Root directory of the startup disk
Ntbootdd.sys (for SCSI only) - Root directory of the startup disk

[Kannedheat]

Thanks pabloguevara