On Fri, November 18, 2005 11:53 am, Alex Williamson wrote: > I work as the IT guy at a small private school. > > I'm trying to help students buy inexpensive computers using a free OS > and software. > I needed to test the latest free Linux on my workstation as a dual boot. > > I installed Cheap-Bytes Fedora Core 4 on an WinXP machine's second EIDE > drive. > The installation went fine but on reboot no GRUB loader menu showed, > just plain old XP. > > I tried this on an identical machine and got the same results. > I suspect that this is do to using the second drive. If I remember correctly most of the distros will by default install GRUB to the MBR of the drive with the root or boot partition. In your case if this was the second, non-boot, drive then you wouldn't have seen the boot loader. XP's boot loader is still the one in place on the drive. > I blew XP away on the second machine and successfully installed Core 4 > as a single boot. > Makes sense given the above analysis > I had previously successfully installed Cheap-Bytes Linux 10 for dual > boot on a third machine identical to the machines that failed. I had the > choice of the LILO boot loader in that case. Core 4 only offers GRUB. > > Is this really a loader issue or something else? > > Any Ideas?? Can I resurrect the first machine with a boot floppy? How > would I configure? I can't see the actual file structure of the machine > that won't boot properly. > A couple of options are available to try in this case. You might try booting the Fedora install CD to "Rescue" mode and rebuilding GRUB to the primary master's MBR. You could use a boot floppy to try the same thing, but if you didn't create boot floppy during setup, it may be more trouble than its worth to get one working for what you need to do. Generally if you are putting the installation on a slave then you want to create a boot floppy "just in case". > One more question. Where can I get a comprehensible and comprehensive > tutorial on GRUB? > GRUB tutorial at: http://www.openbg.net/sto/os/xml/grub.html Have fun! -- Jack Ungerleider The Ungerleider Group jack at jacku.com http://www.jacku.com