XP cannot boot after installing Fedora?

Question

I install Fedora after installing XP.. During fedora-10 installation i give XP as default boot. then after installing fedora XP shows "Disk boot failure, Insert system disk and press enter " this error. but fedora boots normally.. by giving the command FIXMBR XP boots normally then fedora will not boot.when i give grub-install /dev/sda from fedora Disc then fedora boots normally but XP cannot boot.Please help me for using both OS normally.

Answer 1

It's some sort of GRUB config error. You have to use grub, XP bootloader won't load anything non-Microsoft.



You should try Ubuntu. It's loads better than Fedora

Answer 2

Instead of "fixmbr", use the command "bootfix" (or was it "fixboot"? I forgot, check both). This usually happens when the partition numbers get reordered. Considering that it is a quite recent version of fedora, the probability of the error being from the boot loader (GRUB) is pretty low.



If it is the case of wrong partition #, bootfix should fix it, but you will end up with having two XP partitions according to XP's boot loader (not GRUB). If you find that annoying, you will have to remove the first entry from C:\boot.ini manually. This file will be hidden by default. If you are unsure of editing this file, maybe you would want to take the help of someone who is more familiar with it.

Answer 3

For future reference, if you use FIXMBR after installing Fedora, you will wipe out the boot loader installed by grub.



You probably just need to edit the menu.lst file in grub to make sure the Windows partition configuration is correct. Boot Fedora, then as root, open /boot/grub/menu.lst for editing.



Make sure the windows partition configuration is pointing to the correct partition in the chain, and that the chainloader is called for Windows. Do a Google search on this and you'll find a lot of supporting information.

Answer 4

You should probably boot it into another partition exclusive to its use. If you want to try out other operating systems, i suggest you download virtual machines programs such as VMware or Virutal PC.