Fedora 14 install failure with dual boot.

[Billaboard]

I downloaded Fedora 15 Live and Fedora 14 Live to try to see where Linux is for music and broadcast audio on a laptop. It turns out I have to use 14.
14 and 15 both sort of work as live out of the box, although why they ship with the common Broadcom wifi driver missing and the touchpad tap disabled beats me. I also never found the magic button to close down 15. There must be one, but blow me I couldn't find it.

Then I tried to follow the instructions at
http://www.thpc.info/dual/win7/dualb...d_on_win7.html
which mostly seemed to work. I need to keep Win 7 as this is the 32-bit test machine.
I used EasyBCD v2.1 rather than the older version the guide is written
for.

Booting into Win7 at first worked,
then a boot into Linux stopped at a line that said something about a
kernel thread helper
Then Win 7 blue screened on boot, although it would boot to Safe Mode.
Removed Veriface from the Lenovo laptop and it would boot Win 7.
Tried setting Drive in EasyBCD to "Boot" rather than "C:\" for Fedora.
Big mistake.
Now booting Fedora gave a Windows missing file message and croaked.
Repairing startup with the Win 7 boot CD cured Win 7.
Repeated the loop with the same failures.

Re-partitioned and re-installed Fedora and just the same - a screen of text that stops.

I can now boot to Windows and need help to sort out the Linux boot.

How do I start to investigate the screen of text saying things like "__bad_area_nosemaphore" ?

[Billaboard]

In the absence of any replies, I'm forced to follow-on and ask if anyone can tell me if these are the expected partition reports from the 3 OS's I've tried

Looked at the partitions in Win 7. My comments follow the * on each
line... It reports the
100MB NTFS System Reserved (System, Active, Primary) *(hidden boot
partition)
C: 90.36 NTFS Healthy (Boot, PageFile, Crash Dump, Primary) *the Win7
one
53.71 Healthy (Primary) *The Linux partition
4.88 Healthy (Primary) *The swap partition


Fired up from my Ubuntu 10.4 thumb drive. Ubuntu reports...

160GB 97GB Filesystem * the Win7 partition
160GB Fedora-14-i686 Type: Unknown type, Size: Unknown

* and the Ubuntu "drive"


Then tried Gparted Live CD which reports

/dev/sda3 Ext4 _Fedora-14-i686 53.71GiB
/dev/sda4 Extended 4.88GiB
/dev/sda5 Linux-swap 4.88 GiB

and it reports that sda3 is not mounted and
sda5 is Not Active when being looked at from Gpartedjk.

Does any of this make any sense? Ubuntu doesn't seem terribly helpful.

The boot procedure looks as though it is pointing to the right things -
the Fedora boot going from the Windows hidden boot sector to the Linux
mbr in the MST directory on the root of the Windows C: drive.

[stoat]

I didn't read every line of the EasyBCD guide, but it seemed reasonable like most of them do. Shrink Windows, install Fedora with GRUB in the first sector of its boot partition, create a menu entry in EasyBCD. Should have worked.

To me, the Windows 7 and GParted Live CD partition descriptions at least are consistent with what you did following that EasyBCD guide. They likely are consistent with each other, too, but maybe you just didn't mention the extended partition in the Windows 7 layout or the Windows partitions in the GParted layout. I don't know what the Ubuntu example means, or what utility in Ubuntu said that. It might be more accurate and helpful to post screenshots of those things.

I also don't know about the "__bad_area_nosemaphore" and "kernel thread helper" things. Maybe in addition to boot loader issues (which maybe you have fixed, I don't know), you also have some boot time issues with Fedora. Anyway, it happens all the time. Try reproducing those and take a picture of the screen with a digital camera and attach it to your next post. Maybe somebody will recognize it and have a suggestion. It's my best idea for that stuff.

[Billaboard]

Here are some pics attached. Sorry about the quality - having a terrible time trying to resize without getting artefacts.

The first is what Gparted sees, the second what I see when booting into Fedora 14, and the 3rd is the Windows 7 file management display.

[stoat]

They're okay. I can see enough of them to tell that GParted and the Windows Disk Management utility are in parallel universes. I have no explanation for that discrepancy, but I do dimly remember something similar recently. Of course I can't remember a thing about it or where it is.

For that boot time debug spew, there is a bunch of acpi stuff mentioned all through that screen. I can't say with confidence what to do about that, but I do know there are some kernel boot parameters related to acpi that people often have to use. I would just start playing around with that (search around here for acpi boot parameters) until maybe somebody who really knows what you should do comes by.

[Billaboard]

Thanks, stoat, for the encouragement.

I have now taken Gparted and deleted both Linux partitions, and recreated them as Ext4 and linux-swap with the same sizes as before. I checked that Windows 7 still started. I also downloaded Fedora 14 live again, this time from the Fedora Torrent site.
Both Fedora 14 CD's seem the same and both run as live programs. However, when I start the Install to hard drive, I see a black square with a message flash past saying something about "Kernel Crash". That happened twice, so I rebooted and tried again to copy the whole message, but it failed to appear.

I then let the install go ahead, but probably let it run on, so now Windows 7 thinks it's on the D: drive and won't start, the system booting into the same failed Fedora screen posted earlier.

I've tried the standard Win 7 repair methods which have failed to get booting to work correctly, so now I'm about to try a full restore of Windows 7 from a system image. This reformats, I think, so it ought to work.

I can't say that this has gone well. I may try again in a few days, weeks or, perhaps, years.

I would still be interested in any input that helps me discover what might be going wrong.