I would be amazed if they repeat this mistake again but having said that I have had problems dual booting every version of Redhat with Windows (going back to RH7 and Win 98)

According to the article I mentioned the Linux partitioning utilities "Fdisk" and "CFdisk" are able to accurately work out the CHS geometry values but "parted" does not - so maybe you should use one of these. Personally I would be inclined to use Mandrake's "HardDrake" partitioning tool as it's very easy to use and I have never had a problem.

Alan

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedor.../msg00908.html

Please note that the date on this is 7 days after the general availability. It seems that the install solution was posted here the day after FC2 was released.

the only windows utility I know of that will format your drive and make it useable is the windows 98 boot disk fdisk utility. Yes you heard me right. That was the only way to recover my drive when the mbr got trashed. then when you reboot under the same win98 boot disk just run a format c: on your drive. Reboot with your winxp disc in the drive and it should run automatically. Of course you will probably want to reformat with ntfs quick when you install winXP. Hope this helps and wasn't too late for you

You might also want to throw a "fdisk /mbr" in there. (It's either "fdisk /mbr" or "fdisk -mbr", I forget.)

/mbr

I just used the XP cd to delete drive c:\ and then re created it, no need for anything else. I've only been bitten by the fedora install problem once and when I set the access mode on my drive to LBA the problem never came back.

I can dual boot FC2 or 3 (or even Suse 9.1) with XP Home on a single HDD without any probs whatsoever. I also use XP's disk management to delete all Linux partitions if I feel like a change of distro followed by booting into rescue mode with the XP cd and applying fixboot and fixmbr to get rid of grub.

One other thing I always do when installing FC2 or 3 is to manually partition using Disk Druid instead of using the Automatically Partition option.

Hope any of the above helps anyone experiencing dual boot problems. All of the above works everytime for me flawlessly, but it may or may not work for everyone.

I have a dual drive installation, but FC3 *DID* fuck up the partition tables... what I did was to reinstall FC and delete all the partitions (selecting hdb, instead of each individual partition, like I tried before) and then make them all again.

It's runnig perfectly, now...

the solution is to use a knoppix disc
open partimage
delete all the partitions on the drive
format to reseirfs

save settings
place a boot floppy/cd in the drive and restart
at the A> write
fdisk /mbr
press enter
FIXMBR via the repair consule in XP
if XP boot off the disc and do a format & install
if 9x use fdisk to set the drive up
then format the drive...

there is a glitch that if the mbr has been altered to an unreadable state that XP can't interpret then the disc wont even boot. that is why I recommend the win98 fdisk utility first.

Just decided to report, today installed Fedora 3 on my laptop and everything seems to be alright, when i had Fedora 2 I couldn't access Partition Magic, it would give some non fixable errors, just now it worked fine.
so i believe it is fixed.

The same happen to me with FC3... the drive would be all yellow and it gave this stupid error. But all is fine now..

You just have to repartition everything and remake the MBR.

Which Windows are you using? If it is XP you have to (after cleaning partitions) "fixboot" and then "fixmbr"

Rather interesting that no one has stood up to defend Fedora, no one at all!

Let me just say here, that I've installed Fedora on my system about a dozen times, and not once have I been bitten by this particular bug.

Also, I've got the following configuration right now, working flawlessly :

/dev/hda1 : Windows 98 (For legacy purposes)
/dev/hda5 : Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (So my sisters can check their e-mail and use Yahoo!)
/dev/hdb1 : Fedora Core 3 (Grub installed on MBR)
/dev/hdb2 : Mandrake 9.2 (Lilo on root partition)
/dev/hdb3 : Fantasy II (Based on Fedora 3 | Grub on root partition)
/dev/hdb5 : Linux Swap

I use Fedora as my primary OS. Mandrake was only installed because I had the CD's lying around and an empty partition. I use Fedora all the time, and never ever had a problem with it.

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I love Fedora, and have great respect for the people who work hard and spend hours of their precious time to give us a robust and highly stable operating system. I also salute Red Hat, who are, according to me, pioneers in the race among linux distributions.

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