I tried to install Fedora on an external USB drive last night, and it still didn’t work out. Then I made a big mistake by deciding to install Fedora using the “free space” on my Windows hardware. The hard drive partition was then incorrectly done, and I had to recover the whole system today, for 10 straight hours. Finally, it’s all done. I created a 20GB partition for Fedora, and the system was installed perfectly. Well, almost perfectly. Fedora’s boot loader (GRUB) chooses hd(0,0) as the default “Other” OS. The problem is, Compaq’s recovery disk puts its recovery section (D:\ Drive) in this partition, and whenever GRUB tries to boot from “Other”, Compaq’s recovery session is loaded instead of Windows XP. I still couldn’t figure out why ? This has been a nightmare. I’ve installed Red Hat 3 years ago on my old Pentium III, and it was damn good and very well self-configured. Not sure what went wrong with Fedora though.
I tried to “force” GRUB to use the command “rootnoverify (hd0,1) /n chainloader +1” instead of “rootnoverify (hd0,0) /n Chainloader +1”, which is default at the moment. The commands I used are “GRUG> rootnoverify (hd0,1) save” and “GRUG> rootnoverify (hd),1) savedefault”, but they didn’t work. =(
Anyways, until I find the solution to this challenge, I will just have to keep modifying the stupid command line in order to boot Windows XP…
