How to make my dual boot Fedora/Windows XP bootable?

[CharlesC]

I have a Pentium III computer with two disks

* Disk 1 has Windows ME and Windows XP
Boot Magic is installed
* Disk 2 has a Linux partition (10GB) and
a FAT32 partition.

I used to have Red Hat 7.2 installed and I recently
did a brand new installation of Fedora Core 2 on
the Disk 2 Linux partition.

The problem I have is that I can't boot the second disk!

Boot Magic has a menu of two items: Windows and Linux.
The Windows menu uses the first disk for booting
either Windows Me or Windows XP, but if I choose the Linux
option to boot from the second disk, the boot process hangs....
because there is nothing to boot from on the second disk.

This setup worked previously with Red Hat, but during my
installation of Fedora, I obviously made a mistake
and lost the ability to boot!

I tried the reinstallation again in order to get GRUB
onto the second disk, but the graphical Disk
Druid program only gave me the choice of installing
GRUB on the first disk, /dev/hda.

What do I need to do to make my Fedora bootable?
Remember that I don't want to make any changes to the
first disk.

[james_in_denver]

You could always make a boot floppy or cdrom?....

There are more options than that though, here's one, where you just add Linux to the XP bootloader menu.

http://www.hk8.org/old_web/linux/lnut/ch04_04.htm

[promark]

You will have to install your bootloader (GRUB) in to the MBR of you first fixed disk and it will give you the option to boot to either flavor of M$ or the FC2 installation

[CharlesC]

Thanks for the link to the Linux in a nutshell page
"Dual Booting Linux and Windows NT/2000".

This procedure indicates I am updating a menu on my first disk
drive where my previously installed Red Hat booted OK after
I chose "Linux" from Boot Magic.

Would an alternative be to boot my Fedora using the Rescue mode of CD 1
and run the "lilo" command?

[james_in_denver]

Yes,

you can use that to boot your current linux install.

The reason I didn't mention using lilo was that you mentioned that you didn't want to change anything on the first disk.

Running "lilo" WILL CHANGE the boot sector on your first disk. IF you are okay with that, proceed with caution, and triple check your /etc/lilo.conf file to make sure that it's pointing to both your windows and linux partitions, and don't blame me if your XP side won't boot anymore, sometimes changing the boot record requires you to boot from the xp install disk to fix the mbr, kind of like what you are doing with lilo

[james_in_denver]

I forgot to mention a neat little trick that might help you out.

as the "root" user in linux, you can issue a "dd if=/dev/hda of=/boot.sav bs=512 count=1"

that will take the first block (512 bytes) from your hard disk (hda = the first "raw" disk).
It contains the partition and boot information for that disk. the "of" flag is the "output file", ie, where you want to save that 512byte block to, and "count" is how many of those blocks to you want to grab.

You can reverse the process by typeing in "dd if=/boot.sav of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1"

That will take the 512 byte "boot.sav" file and physically write it to the first block of your first hard disk, and it will do it for exactly "1" block.

BE CAREFUL, the "dd" command does raw reads and writes. if you type in the wrong "bs" or "blocksize" or the wrong"count" you can kinda screw things up in a bad way.

If this helps, reputation me up.

[imdeemvp]

why dont you swap your drives? it will be much easier that way....

make linux primary and xp, me, slave!