Bootdisk for Fedora Core 4

Booting to Fedora Core 3

try this for now;

Get a freshly formatted floppy disk and have it ready toinsert into the floppy drive.

Boot in to rescue mode from the 1st install cd of fc3. At the boot prompt, type in;

linux rescue (hit the enter key)

When that is done, insert the floppy disk into the drive.

Then chroot into the mounted filesystem

chroot /mnt/sysimage (hit the enter key)

then type in

grub-install /dev/fd0 (hit the enter key)

Give that a few minutes to complete (there is a delay).

Take out the Fedora install cd.

Reboot, making sure that the bios is set to boot first from a floppy.

See if grub gives you the menu to boot to Fedora or Windows.

Then we will look more closely at the Grub file.
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” I love it when a plan comes together.” – Hannibal Smith


I have been buildig up a new dual boot PC over the last couple of days. I am using my son’s old desktop, a AMD 900. I installed W2K Server to test out the WSUS client and the Visual Studio Beta. I had a NFR W2K server on the shelf so this was a no cost experiment. To make things interesting I did a standard install on a NTFS disk. Traditionally you need to plan ahead when you want to dual boot and make sure you install NT/W2K/XP on a FAT32. In this case, I forgot. So I set about making this configuration work. The hardware has previously worked with both W2K Pro and Linux so I was pretty sure I would not have many compatibilty problems. The only new hardware was a recycled 10 GB hard drive to hold linux. The Fedora installation went fine and I rebooted. It booted immediately into W2K without a mention of linux’s boot manager, Grub. So I cranked up the Fedora Rescue disk and checked out the Fedora installation. It was there. I just couldn’t boot to it. What I needed was the old boot disk yet I don’t remember Fedora Core 4 installation asking me if I needed one. I hunted and hunted thhrough the documentation till I found this off the internet. Grub complained about the bios of the hard drive used to store the boot partition. That’s when I remembered I had to set the drive to LBA for linux to work. It is interesting that I could install with Auto setting but I needed LBA to boot. Now I can use the floppy to start linux. Since I had a functioning linux I could now go on to the slicker options of dual booting with a NTFS based Windows.