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I've just spent a most frustrating 36 hours. I've been putting together a new machine (hardware specs below), and attempting to create a dual boot (Win2k and Fedora). The Win2k installation went smoothly. Linux, not so much. New machine: Motherboard: ASUS A7V8X-X CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (1.91Mhz +512 L2 cache) Memory: PC2700 512 Mb Disks: (1) 40 Gb Western Digital (1) 120 Gb Maxtor CD R/W & DVD combo Video: ATI RADEON 9600 PRO NIC, Sound integrated with Motherboard I've installed Win2k on the 40Gb drive, set up as hda. I've set up two partitions, for a C & D drive, and a small extra partition to be used for /boot on linux. No problems so far. Trying to install Fedora, however, has been a nightmare. I've installed RedHat a number of times before (as well as Mandrake, Vector, Debian, and Gentoo - I'm a rank amature, but an experienced one) without even the hint of such problems. I've tried to install on hdb, the 120Gb drive (with /boot on hda). I've had freezes and crashes during most phases of the install; they can be broken down into three categories: 1) Error copying/installing package The error text says that there could be a hardware error, faulty install medium, or full disk. The latter two have been checked; hardware is brand new (FWIW). 2) During graphical setup start, error initialising x display. 3) Error during partition/format. When this happens, an immediate warm reboot shows that the machine BIOS itself no longer recognises either hard drive. Cold boot clears this. Interestingly, I've sometimes been able to restart the installation after #1, and complete it, but no boot loader gets loaded as it says I've done nothing kernel-related. I've been trying to follow the advice given in the install and place my boot loader on my boot partition and not in the MBR, as Win2k is an NT-derivative. Remembering a recent post to this list, I had set up my hard drives to be explicit Master/Slave; in desparation I changed them to Cable Select. This allowed the installation to complete successfully, on the first run, and more quickly than previously. However, I still don't get the Grub screen (boot into Win2k automatically). I know that I can edit boot.ini on my C: drive to act as a boot loader, but am not sure of the correct parameters for linux. For all I know, I do have grub installed on /boot, but I'm not finding it at startup. Should I have installed this to the MBR anyway? Is there a way of moving this properly? Might I have missed anything else? TIA, -Don Levey
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