Is there a way to make a new boot sector for XP? I currently have a ravaged XP install on my C drive (my main is D) and both boot sector are on C right now. I want to remove the C boot from the boot choices and move the D boot sector to D so that C is open for Fedora Core 5 completely and not shared with XP. Is there any way to do this?

The boot sector isn't part of any one partition. It is per-harddrive, not per-partition.

Aside from that, I have no idea what you are asking. What boot loader are you using? The WinXP one? GRUB? LILO? If the drives are physically seperate, do you want it to boot to the second drive?

Oh, and don't use windows drive letters, as those have no signifcance whatsoever. Use something like hdd1, hdd2, hdd3, etc... numbered in the order there are detected (ide primary master == hdd1, ide primary slave == hdd2, etc)

I currently only have XP installed. I want to fix this problem before I get Linux onto this rig.

Okay, I think this can help to clear this up:

I have 2 XP installs (one is busted) and I want to put FC5 on the drive where the busted one is alone. To do this I need to format that drive. However, the boot sector for my "working" XP is on there and it won't format it because that's where its boot is. I suppose it's bad for me to as well. I want to move the boot for the working XP to its drive instead of infecting 2 drives while removing the ability to boot to the busted XP.

The XP one (as it's the only thing on here right now). And yes, all my drives are physically separate.

Oh, didn't know that. I can't remember exactly what order I put them in the BIOS, but the XP one will get precedence (as my parents may boot it up and wouldn't know step one of getting back into XP).

There's no need to worry about keeping the MBR intact. If the broken install is on hda (or hdd1) you can just format hda and install FC5 on it. During the install phase, when it installs the boot loader, it should find all other OSes (XP on the other drive in this case). If you're using GRUB, then, you can just go into the menu.lst (in /boot/grub for me) file and make the entry for XP the default to boot into.
If the working install is on HDA, then you'll need to change your BIOS settings to boot from hdb by default, or just switch the drives on the IDE cable, so it'll use the boot loader.
If, for some reason, it doesn't find XP when installing, you'll need to go into the menu.lst file again, and add:

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You'll need to change the "root (hd0,1)" line to whatever it's on for you, probably hd0,0, or hd1,0 (hd0 for primary drive, hd1 for slave).

Yeah, I too was thinking that once you have a bootloader on the system, it should solve most of your problems related to that.

Thanks guys. I just want to get this clear before I mess up something:
I should just install FC5 to the drive I want and let the bootloader take care of things? (i.e. boot.ini is worthless now due to GRUB and such)

Yup, just be sure your BIOS is set to boot from that drive.

Okay. Thanks again. Now off to install it.

Be sure to let us know how it goes when/if you get it running again.

The check on disc 3 failed, so I'm going to re-download it and try again... Hopefully the main image on the site isn't bad and it was the download...

I *think* you only need the first CD to actually install it, and the other CDs are just package CDs for extras. The first one (maybe needing the second) should get you up with a GUI - although I'm not 100% positive about that.

Well, I got FC5 running, but XP won't boot. All it prints are the lines from grub.conf (which I can't edit anymore it seems) and then nothing. The disk is recognized and everything, but it still doesn't do anything.

you should be able to edit grub.conf with this (assuming you are in the proper directory.


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Elfprince, why are you sudo vi'ing there? Last time I checked, vi was not a privileged command .... unless grub.conf has write protection or something...

exactly. you have to be root to write to system files.

Ah, I didn't realize that it classified itself as a system file. Fair enough.

What do I need to set the options to start XP up to for it to work? Right now, only the options are shown for bootup and then it hangs:

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How do I get XP to boot off of hd1? Nothing I have done so far is working, so any help would be appreciated.

you have the ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini in that drive, correct?

I myself have never had luck with Grub loading Windows for some odd reason, so my bootloader is backwards to everyone elses, I use the windows loader to boot, and if I want Linux, then I have it load Grub, and it works just fine.

That's what I asked above. I asked if it was alright to remove boot.ini and such and Tari said it shouldn't matter with GRUB. I think I'll run the recovery console and see if that can help to fix things.

What I use in my configuration to boot my Vista beta is:

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