Dual Booting help

okay here is my situation:

i wanted to install linux on my computer along wiht my windows. so i put in the extra hard drive we had and it is now the slave and my hard drive with windows is master. i installed fedora core 5 on the new hard drive that i watned to for linux and it says install went fine. whenever i boot my computer it goes straight to windows so i got to the boot sequence and chose to boot off my other hard drive first and when i do that it says "error loading operating system"…. now if i swtiched the windows hard drive to slave and the other to master would it make a difference? any help on this situation at all would be greatly appreciated…

well i personally would set Linux as the master but i don't think that it would fix your problem. Did you choose to install a boot-loader or did you skip it in the installation?

it didnt ask about a boot loader…it just said "installing boot loader" and had the progress bar going across….

try booting from the cd again and see if it has a rescue mode. when your in the rescue shell try:

grub-install /dev/hda

I don't know if fedora uses grub but if it does then that should reinstall it.

alright man i'll try it and yes it does use grub

didnt work….i got into the rescue option and i typed in what you said and it said something about the hard drive not corresponding to BIOS or something…should i just try a different distro?

There are two ways of fixing this, but the easiest way to do it will be last one listed…

Reconfigure your hard drives to make your Fedora distro your primary harddrive…this should allow you to boot with grub. Now that you are in Fedora, locate your grub.conf file and make a copy of it with a different name (store it somewhere easily accessable, in case you mess up…happens to all of us) edit your grub.conf file and manually add a line for your windows distribution

rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1```

in the (hd0,0) part, you will have to put the location of your hard drive.  Most likely, that situation it will be  (hd1,0) but can be different for each setup.

Having done this, save and reboot.  Your grub bootloader should now pop-up with your FC5(kernelversion) and Windows XP

The second way of doing it, and this is the way my box is setup with XP and Slackware.

Backup and reformat both HD's
Reinstall Windows first on your primary drive (reserving half of the primary drive for it)
Reinstall Fedora on the leftover disc space on your primary drive.  When you do this, grub will automatically add Windows to your grub.conf. (no mess...no hassle)
Then on your second harddrive, format it in FAT so that both of your operating systems can have read/write access.  (your asking for headache if you format it with NTFS)

Ya, this exact thing happened to me around the time when FC5 was first released, so i booted off cd again and this time decided to check the media for errors. as you can imagine it came up with a butload of errors on disk 3 so i booted back into windows re burnt the cd and re installed fc5 and lo and behold every thing worked just fine.