Problem for Fedora 8.0 share a hard disk with FreeBSD 7.0

[Cyberman]

I just bought a new 320-GB disk and try to install Fedora 8.0 and FreeBSD.

First time:
I installed FreeBSD first with only one master partition (slice) using the first 40GB of the disk, without MBR installed. Then I install Fedora use the other disk space. Every thing went fine, but after I rebooted the system, it couldn't continue after this printed:
Red Hat nash version 6.0.19 starting.
At that time I can still use root(hd0,0) under GRUB to boot FreeBSD.

Then I tried again:
I deleted all the diskpart, and installed Fedora with /boot at the beginning of the disk. This time it can boot normally. Then I installed FreeBSD on the free space, and when I tried to reboot it, the problem ocurred again.
And this time I got a new problem:
I have an old disk with Windows XP installed, this disk is sda and the newer disk is sdb. But GRUB recognized the new one as hd0 and the old one as hd1. First installation Fedora generated correct grub.conf but the second time it generated a error one with sda begin hd0, so it couldn't find the kernel file. Is that a but with Fedora 8.0? After I changed it, it can find the kernel but still stopped after print message with 'Red Hat nash'.

[Cyberman]

Nobody know it? I've tried to delete the master partition of BSD and it seems that Fedora going fine. Is there any malicious competition between them?

[OralDeckard]

No Cyberman there is no evil Sith at work here.

But during installation you must watch Anaconda very closely, as it will tell you that it is about to install the MBR on a disk that may or may not be the one you are installing to. In this case you can click on advanced and provide it with some much needed guidance.

If you don't want any possibility of error you might consider disconnecting any drive that is not the drive you are installing to before you begin the installation.

During installation of F8 you will be given an opportunity to select other OSs to boot. I have never installed BSD so I cannot speak for that. But if it is installed first, then F8 will probably find it on your drive and allow you to add it to the list. You can also type it in if it is now found. If you install F8 first, perhaps someone else can tell you how BSD will handle adding F8..

Many BIOSes allow you to choose which drive will be selected to boot. That usually becomes hd0. If you choose to disconnect other drives, then this method will be your first means of dual booting, as no dual boot information is yet in your grub.conf file. You can upgrade your grub.conf file to allow dual booting after you have

[Cyberman]

Thanks to OralDeckard. The installation is fine. The problem is that Fedora couldn't boot up with a FreeBSD partition on the same disk. It seems that nash have tried to do something with the others partition not belonging to Fedora, and the BSD partition made it into a dead loop, or blocked.
Every time if I use a cd to boot the system and delete the BSD partition, Fedora will became OK.
The keybaord still can responses in that situation.
The disaster for the old disk I think maybe it's my mis-operation, since I'm tried to edit grub.conf and reinstall it into the MBR. The iniitial install didn't make any mistake, I've tryed WinXP every time.
If I choose the second SATA disk it's sdb under Fedora, but fur GRUB it has to be hd0.

[OralDeckard]

You're welcome Cyberman. I'm glad I could help. I'm usually here looking FOR help, and am glad folks are so generous with their time. So if I can do a little providing, instead of just getting help, I am glad for the opportunity.

[brr872002]

Originally Posted by Cyberman

Thanks to OralDeckard. The installation is fine. The problem is that Fedora couldn't boot up with a FreeBSD partition on the same disk. It seems that nash have tried to do something with the others partition not belonging to Fedora, and the BSD partition made it into a dead loop, or blocked.
Every time if I use a cd to boot the system and delete the BSD partition, Fedora will became OK.
The keybaord still can responses in that situation.
The disaster for the old disk I think maybe it's my mis-operation, since I'm tried to edit grub.conf and reinstall it into the MBR. The iniitial install didn't make any mistake, I've tryed WinXP every time.
If I choose the second SATA disk it's sdb under Fedora, but fur GRUB it has to be
hd0.

Try to give unique label for your root partition during install of fedora like /1 or /2,
Boot your XP editing grub.conf from your second drive.
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1)
chainloader +1

[Cyberman]

Originally Posted by brr872002

Try to give unique label for your root partition during install of fedora like /1 or /2,
Boot your XP editing grub.conf from your second drive.
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1)
chainloader +1

I don't think it's the problem with the old disk since I've tried to plug it out, but the problem it the same, if there is a FreeBSD slice in the disk partition table Fedora stopped after printing

Red Hat nash version 6.0.19 starting.

It seems that Fedora tried to do something with the FreeBSD partition and cann't continue.

[OralDeckard]

Originally Posted by Cyberman

It seems that Fedora tried to do something with the FreeBSD partition and cann't continue.

Are you commenting on what went on before the problem was resolved, or is the problem not yet resolved ?

[Cyberman]

Originally Posted by OralDeckard

Are you commenting on what went on before the problem was resolved, or is the problem not yet resolved ?

The problem is not resolved yet. The description is that I suspect Fedora do something that cause the problem, not confirmed yet since I'm too busy these days so the installation stopped.

[OralDeckard]

Good morning Cyberman. When first efforts don't quite succeed it becomes necessary to examine each item more closely. I don't mean to nit pick terminology, but non-standard terms may be misunderstood, so I'm going to tell you what I understood you to mean and let you correct me if I missed.

Originally Posted by Cyberman

I just bought a new 320-GB disk and try to install Fedora 8.0 and FreeBSD.

Here was my fist error. I locked on this one drive, with two new installation and didn't pay close enough attention to the second problem, preferring to go after one problem at a time. But it wasn't a different problem. Further down you said:

Originally Posted by Cyberman

And this time I got a new problem:
I have an old disk with Windows XP installed, this disk is sda and the newer disk is sdb. But GRUB recognized the new one as hd0 and the old one as hd1. First installation Fedora generated correct grub.conf but the second time it generated a error one with sda begin hd0, so it couldn't find the kernel file. Is that a but with Fedora 8.0? After I changed it, it can find the kernel but still stopped after print message with 'Red Hat nash'.

If I had been paying proper attention I would have cautioned you here. With both these disks attached it is not just an interaction between Fedora and BSD. It is Windows, Fedora and BSD.

Originally Posted by Cyberman

First time:
I installed FreeBSD first with only one master partition (slice) using the first 40GB of the disk, without MBR installed.

I'm sorry, but you did not install anything without an MBR. The Master Boot Record must exist in order for you to have any partitions. I know you know this, but it needs stated to help us think clearly about what is happening. So instead of "without MBR installed," what was it that was not installed ? I have no guess as to what was not installed here.

Also, I am not familiar with either disk slices or master partitions. I believe the "slice" in question is clearly the 40 GB first partition of the 320 GB drive. But unless you were careful to tell it to put the boot loader on the new 320 GB drive, it went to the MBR of your Windows drive. That is dangerous. You would be much better to not involve the Windows drive and put the boot loader on the MBR of the new 320 GB drive.

Unless you are very aware of this kind of interaction your Windows installation is in grave danger. You should image your Windows installation before you do any more work on installations with it attached. This will give you the ability to restore it if things go badly, which all too often they do.

The last I heard you had Fedora running. You can use it to back up the MBR of your Windows drive. In a terminal window enter:
su -
(your root password)
dd if=sda of=/root/XP-MBR bs=512 count=1

This will disk dump the fist 512 bytes of the Windows drive to a file named XP-MBR in your Fedora /root folder. Then you should copy it to a floppy, a USB thumb drive or anything off the system. You want it to be available in the event Fedora fails to start.

In your BIOS you can usually select which drive is the boot drive. Please verify which it is, and post it. It is probably your old Windows XP drive. When you boot, do you get an option to boot into Fedora or BSD or Windows ? And if you select Windows, does it boot ?

Originally Posted by Cyberman

Then I install Fedora use the other disk space. Every thing went fine, but after I rebooted the system, it couldn't continue after this printed:
Red Hat nash version 6.0.19 starting.
At that time I can still use root(hd0,0) under GRUB to boot FreeBSD.

Here Fedora cannot find its / partition. But there is no mention of Windows being one of the options. Is it?

[QUOT=Cyberman] Then I tried again:
I deleted all the diskpart, and installed Fedora with /boot at the beginning of the disk. This time it can boot normally. Then I installed FreeBSD on the free space, and when I tried to reboot it, the problem occurred again.[QUOTE

OK, /boot is the first partition, probably about 100 MB. The / or about 40 GB ?
And what are the disk labels? When Fedora installs it will label its partitions. If there is no partition labeled / it will label its / partition /. If there is already a partition labeled / it will label its / partition /1, etc. Does BSD label its partitions like this? Since Fedora boots to LABEL=/, what if BSD labeled its / partition /, leaving Fedora to possibly go to the wrong LABEL=/ ? I don't know what BSD does.

The last problem cited was FreeFSD failing to boot. So does "the problem occurred again" mean that FreeBSD again fails to boot but Fedora boots? Or does it mean that FreeBSD boots but Fedora fails ?

The last installation gets to provide the dual boot menu, because it puts its link in the MBR of the boot drive (probably the Windows drive). So with BSD being the last OS installed, it is responsible for booting itself, your Fedora and your Windows.

My preferences appear to run a little counter to the most common practice. I like to keep my drives working independent of one another. That means I don't let an installation of an OS on one drive write anything to the MBR of another drive, and I simply edit the grub.conf to provide the dual boot features I want.

[Cyberman]

Hi OralDeckard:
I'm used to resolve defect of software a lot. Though I'm not very familiar of these two system, I'v tried some way to figure the problem. I've already plugged out the XP disk and only left the new disk installed, but the problem is the same, so I don't think it have any thing to do with XP.

For 'without MBR installed' means that I didn't install the loader of FreeBSD into the MBR.

The problem can be narrowed to that:
If there has a FreeBSD partition in the disk, Fedora will halt during booting. If I delete the partition, anything become fine. Maybe I should try Fedora 7.0. F8 do many thing I don't like it, say, it will 'remember' the setuid, that is to say, if I've used some program use the root password in desktop, unless I quit, otherwise the next run will not prompt for password of root. I think it will make some security issues.

[OralDeckard]

Perhaps F7 will be more to your liking. I too am less than happy with F8 dropping the restricted status of a user account once a the root password has been given for a single action, which has been closed. That didn't happen in F7, and I hope it is gone from F9. But is that a Fedora thing, or is that a kernel thing, affecting all Linuxes ?

At this point I have no more conjectures for what is happening regarding the presence of a BSD partition. I hope F7 does what you need. If not, F9 is now out in beta, and will be released around the first of May. My F9 beta should be finished downloading soon. I really didn't like the KDE desktop in the Alpha LIve CD. I do hope to find the full install of the beta to be more to my liking. Also, the Gnome desktop is a new version. I will give that a try.

[Cyberman]

Maybe I should try to use FB7 as the desktop? I like its configure, but it seems setting up the destop is not a easy thing in it.

For Fedora I like its destop, but there are too many think I don't know how to configure it.

[OralDeckard]

Oh I think setting up the desktop is pretty straight forward.
1 get rid of the clutter of icons on the desktop
2 Go to the K-Menu, or the Infinity in Gnome, and start through the menus, right clicking on each application you wanted added to your main panel, and selecting Add to Main Panel.
3 Say "Hey, I like this much better."

[Cyberman]

For FB7 I means FreeBSD 7.0. Setting up the desktop in it is not easy, especially I'm not a English user