hi everyone. I would like to explain my problem in some detail: I have two physical hard disk drivers C(40G) and D(30G), the Wind Xp is located in C:, before one hour I have installed Fedora cre 5 in D: (14G out of 30G) succefully by using CDs (five Cds) anyway, when the installation was finished, it displays (Congraut. The Installation is Complete... you need to reboot) then I have clicked the reboot button, the computer has started in rebooting process, but it entered to Windows XP directly without any option to select between Linux or WindowsXP, and when I opened the D: drive I did not any thing no Linux nor another OS, it is empty! one friend told me: you need to re-configure the secure mode by using the first Cd again !! is my installation OK? do I need to re-install fedora core 5 ? Could you please give me any help to display multioptions in my computer? many thanks
In most Linux Distro's (during installation) you will be asked if you want to load a boot loader like Grub or Lilo. If you don't do that, you will have no bootloader menu!
Hi full_adder, What do you mean by saying "opening the D:\ drive"? Did you try to open it in Windows, using the Explorer? Or did you try to boot from this drive? I just ask, because it might happen that the bootloader gets installed to the 2nd hard drive which is not set to boot from, so then you would need to set this hard drive as the booting device in your pc's BIOS to make the bootloader run. Might be the wrong idea or might help, don't know. I just thought i'd ask about how your hdd's were set as booting devices.
yes I solved the problem by re-install FC5, and during the new installation process, I specify the bootloader correctly. Now it is OK. anyone wants to install FC5 (may be the prev. releases) may face a trick relates with MBS where you need to let MBS (master boot sector) on hda, however FC5 is located in hdb and is the default OS, why? I don't know, may be because the matter depends on the first OS in the machine, and in my case that is WINDOWS XP. A nother issue is: why can not we see the contents of D: which contains FC5 by using Windows explorer? also I don't know, but I think the main reason relates with data security .. thanks again
To windows the Linux partitions are unknown formats, if you boot into win and run the disk management tool from /My Computer/rightclick -> manage, then the Linux partitions (or complete hard drives) are shown like you see it on this image: you would need some special tools for viewing the contents of linux partitions, some are mentioned in this thread: http://www.techimo.com/forum/showthread.php?t=135976 but in no way edit or change files if you don't know exactly what you are doing. i wouldn't make use of these tools but reboot my system instead. If you are interested in the file system stuff start reading at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system
I have similar situation with ubuntu. I installed ubuntu 8.04 or so and set boot/grub to ubuntu drive. Upon restart computer boots to windoze. Bios doesn't let me switch hard drives for boot device. Wha hoppen? What can I do??