Installing Fedora on a dell

Horlock

Hi and help

I'm having difficulty installing fedora on a dell PC.

The dell came with a 80GB hard disk (and I already have a 160GB one).

So I installed windows on the 160gb one and then went to put fedora onto the dell hard disk (which is currently set up as the second hard disk).

I formatted the disk all fine and officially fedora is now installed on my second hard disk.

When I went through the options I selected to use grub as the boot controller and opted to install the files on the first hard disk.

I choose to have windows as the default - but when I reboot - I don't get any option to go into fedora.

I've done this before on an old PC and never had any problems and I didn't know if it was to do with dell complications like the fact you always get a dell screen before a windows one - and whether dell has it's own loader that prempts grub and overrides it.

Doesn't anyone have any ideas.

Cheers.

Skint1

Check your HDD settings. one as master other set to slave?
Joe

Ganyam

You can have alook at this, might help..

http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

Horlock

Skint1 wrote:

Check your HDD settings. one as master other set to slave?
Joe

They are both sata hard drives so no jumpers (i don't believe it should be necessary)

I've tried switching the drives around - this gives a boot error (unsurprisingly as the one with fedora on doesn't contain any instructions telling it to load they should all be on the windows disk (I think)

Horlock

Ganyam wrote:

You can have alook at this, might help..

http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/

Thanks but this articles seems to be dealing with the opposite issue - ie install fedora and suddenly windows stops working -

I have the opposite - I've installed fedora and fedora doesn't work - I still get windows just great - so all the commands don't work as they require fedora (or linux at least).


Any other solutions/suggestions?

Horlock

Have just found a workaround elsewhere but this doesn't fix it either - but it may provide people with more of a clue as the problem

Use the boot dvd to run fedora in rescue mode (ie run linux rescue)

Then
chroot /mnt/sysimage
then
grubinstall hd0

I get the error message

/dev/sdb1 does not have any corresponding bios drive

Any ideas???

irnbru_2

Horlock wrote:

I've done this before on an old PC and never had any problems and I didn't know if it was to do with dell complications like the fact you always get a dell screen before a windows one - and whether dell has it's own loader that prempts grub and overrides it.

Dell sounds like a BIOS bootsplash.

Horlock wrote:

Doesn't anyone have any ideas.

I wonder if it's a SATA issue.

Can you reverse the drives making the 80GB the primary and re-install Fedora.

Check the grub conf and see where it thinks its booting from.

Horlock

I've got it now - thanks to those who helped - for anyone with similar problems

Solution similar to above

Use the boot dvd to run fedora in rescue mode (ie run linux rescue)

Then
chroot /mnt/sysimage
then
grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

this forces seems to force grub to have a proper look and low and behold it finds the bios drive

then just
grub-install /dev/sda

Thanks again all.