I've got two identical sized hard drives one is totally NTFS and has windows xp on it this drive is the master drive. The slave drive is partitioned with hdb1 boot, hdb3 ,hdb2 ntfs clone of my fresh install of ntfs, hdb 4/5 fat 32 partition of all of my windows media. For what ever reason there is a discrepency in the numbers I'm not sure why. More over on the slave hard drive HDb1/b3 is a fresh install of fedora core 6 and every time I've tried installing fedora in an unformatted partition and let it partition it self or w/e it won't boot. I have the fat32 partition at the end of the drive so i can store media files common to Linux and windows. The backup ntfs partition is there in case my regular windows xp fails I can't and will not change the drive configuration. For some reason every time I've installed in this configuration Grub loads to a: grub> prompt and not a graphical boot I have no idea how to load Linux manually so i can fix this. I have some live cds that I could use but in the live cds I have no idea how I can get root permissions to my installed Linux drive so I can check and see if there is a configuration file problem or not. I have Ubuntu's live cd version 4.10. I also have mandrake move not sure if I've tried using that to get into my fedora... Any help would be appreciated! -DeathKnight Sniper

Virtuilization is not an option my computer is too slow to virtualize and I don't have another pc available to totally dedicate to linux either. -DeathKnight Sniper

The one thing I did not see mentioned in your original post is a Linux swap partition. Do you have a swap partition? If you do not, you should include one in your partitioning scheme. Windows uses a swap file, but Linux usually uses a swap partition. Even though you have 2GB RAM, and Linux will probably never use the swap as virtual RAM, Linux stores other transient data there as well. Another thing that raises a question for me is that you discuss installing fedora in an un-formatted partition and letting it partition itself (I am guessing you intended to say format the partition itself). You would be better off starting with free un-partitioned disk space and allowing the fedora installer to create your Linux partitions in the free space. The existence of any Windows partitions on this drive has nothing to do with your problem. I believe that the lack of a swap partition and your attempt to install Linux to an un-formatted partition are at the root of your trouble. Your Ubuntu Live CD includes QTparted which is a graphical partition manager. You can use it to remove the partition(s) on which you are trying to install fedora, and move your Windows partitions (the ntfs and fat32 partitions) to the back of the drive. With the free space concentrated at the front of the drive, run the fedora installer again. It should work now. If not, post back with any error messages or with more complete information. HTH, Ernie Registered Linux User 247790 ICQ 41060744

Yes I have a swap partition I had some free space at the front of the drive where I installed linux. When I installed and had the installer format the partition there were two other partitions on the hard drive. I have 4 partitions currently on the drive /boot /lvm fc6 root with a swap lvm /hpNTFS and /ext-FAT32 The one really odd thing that cought my eye tho is that although the partitions are physically in the order shown above numerically via /DEV/hdb1-4 they arn't in order. (/boot = /dev/hdb1) (/lvm = /dev/hdb3) (/HPntfs=/dev/hdb2) and (/fat32 = /dev/hdb4) So it lookes like i'd have to swap the device number of 3&2. So if they aren't numerically in order 1-4 and everything is relative to /boot for the Linux partitions, (1,2) would that cause my system to not boot? If that is the case how would I go about fixing that. Granted here I've got 50 gigs of data on /dev/hdb4 so I don't think reformatting the whole drive is a good solution if thats the fix. Am I even going in the right direction with that? -DeathKnight Sniper

I do not think so, but you may be better off with the Windows partitions in an extended partition. If you have room on the drive, create new partitions of equal size to your existing Windows partitions , but in an extended partition. Copy your Windows partitions to the new partitions (qtparted should verify the data after the copy) then remove the original ones. You should then be able to expand the extended partition to cover the entire drive, move the new Windows partitions to the back of the drive and resize the extended partition to use only the space required for the new Windows partitions (so the front of the drive is free again). You may have to remove the fedora partitions and reinstall it to make enough room, or this option may be impractical depending on the size of the drive. It is just an idea. I do not know why your partitions are not numbered in the order of their position (although I have seen this with Windows partitions in the past). I think it has something to do with how the Windows fdisk program writes the partition table in the MBR. Since it is not designed to relocate a partition on the drive, partitions are numbered in the order in which they were created. If other partition managers are used to relocate the partitions on the drive without changing their type (e.g.: a primary partition is relocated from the front to the rear of a drive and remains a primary partition), its entry in the MBR may be edited, but the entry's position would be unchanged, but again this is only a guess. The only way this could affect operation would be if your root partition numbered 1 or your lvm partition numbered 3 are being accessed as 1 and 2 or 2 and 3 respectively. You can check the /etc/fstab file on your root partition using Ubuntu to insure this is not the case. Related information: Four primary partitions are allowed on a drive. One such partition may be an extended partition which can in turn contain secondary partitions. Secondary partitions are also known as logical volumes. Linux numbers primary partitions on a drive from number 1 to number 4. Secondary partitions are numbered beginning with the number 5, so if you have an IDE drive with two primary partitions (one of which is an extended partition) and two secondary partitions, they would be identified as /dev/hda1 (the first primary partition) /dev/hda5 (the first secondary partition), and /dev/hda6 (the second secondary partition). The extended partition will not be seen except in a partition manager such as qtparted (it would then be identified as /dev/hda2). If you have four primary partitions (one is an extended partition) and two secondary partitions on this IDE drive, they will be identified as follows: /dev/hda1 (the first primary partition), /dev/hda2 (the second primary partition), /dev/hda3 (the third primary partition), /dev/hda5 (the first secondary partition), /dev/hda6 (the second secondary partition). The extended partition will still not be seen except in a partition manager (e.g.: qtparted) where it would be identified as /dev/hda4. HTH, Ernie Registered Linux User 247790 ICQ 41060744

Boot a live CD, and run: fdisk -l /dev/sdb and post the output please. As live CD root, try something like: mkdir -p /mnt/devb mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/devb Then list the contents of your grub setup: cat /mnt/devb/grub/menu.lst and post that.

I ordered a fedora core 6 live cd and it's on the way I'll post that info when the the media gets here. I don't think my old ubuntu live cd knows how to read lvm. I also ordered fedora core 7 and 7's live dvd. -DeathKnight Sniper