[clug] Fighting for control...

[Ian McCulloch]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Paul Wayper wrote:

> Ladies, Gentlemen, and those still unsure;
> 
> Two questions:
> 
> Firstly, is anyone else getting spam in German these days?  I translated a 
> bit of it through Babelfish and it reads even more like the ramblings of an 
> incoherent loon than the normal efforts - something about his son being hit 
> with a tennis racquet and he not being a right-wing extremist and paying 
> his taxes.  Just another oddity...
> 
> Secondly, Windows 2000 has now won the fight over Fedora Core 2 for control 
> of my work-and-games machine.  After it refused to install on the second 
> drive, and I installed it on a spare partition on the first (which I 
> luckily had handy), 

I think, Windows can only run off the first drive.

> it has now marked its partition as active, the Linux 
> Boot partition as inactive, and starts up just fine.  I haven't tried 
> plugging the parameters for booting Linux into the Windows 2000 setup just 
> yet; I wanted GRUB to do it.  The scenario is basically this:
> 
> /dev/hdc0 - 5MB - Linux - /boot
> /dev/hdc1 - 20GB - Linux - /
> /dev/hdc2 - 1GB - Linux Swap
> /dev/hdc3 - 16GB - Windows 2000 - active.
> 
> I can boot up in rescue mode from the Fedora Core 2 CD and see the hard 
> drive fine.  I tried setting partition 0 as active and partition 3 as not - 
> it only says "Cannot Load Operating System".  I even tried overwriting the 
> boot partition with a copy I fortuitously took before I took the step of 
> installing Windows 2000 (knowing that it might start making my life more 
> interesting than normal) - same thing.  I've tried re-running the FC2 
> install process and 'upgrading' the install I have, which looked as if it 
> should have worked - but it did nothing different from the above two attempts.
> 
> If worst comes to worst I'll install FC2 again, but does anyone have any 
> useful insights to getting the two operating systems working and booting 
> side by side happily?

Presumably, win2k installed its own loader on the MBR of the boot disk 
(which might not be hdc).  Did you reinstall GRUB on it?  'upgrading' FC2 
probably wouldn't do it for you.  Have a look at the info page for grub: 
"Installing GRUB natively" 
(konqueror bookmark "info:/grub/Installing GRUB natively")

HTH,
Ian McCulloch