Trying to boot Fedora 16 on a dual boot system

T

testdpt

Member
Hi,

I have Acer Aspire 6930G notebook. I bought it about 2 or 3 years ago.
It has Intel Core 2 Duo processor P7450, 4GB of RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650, two hard disk drives with about ~460GB each.

First hard drive (hda) was divided in four primary partitions:
1 - ~12GB partition (system recovery partition or other software from manufacturer)
2 - ~197GB partition with Windows Vista 32bits (NTFS)
3 - ~250GB partition for storage (NTFS)
4 - ~3GB partition (system recovery partition or other software from manufacturer)
Second disk (hdb) has just one NTFS partition for storage

I've installed Fedora 16 on the first disk (with the nogpt option on install cmd line), deleting the 250GB partition and creating one extended partition in its place, adding a 200GB logic partition for "/" and another logic partition with 4GB for the "swap".
I've selected Fedora boot loader (GRUB) to be installed at it's partition "/" (hda5). The new config:

hda1 - ~12GB partition (system recovery partition or other software from manufacturer)
hda2 - ~197GB partition with Windows Vista 32bits (NTFS)
hda4 - extended partition with the logic partitions:
hda5 - 200GB Fedora 16 "/" (ext4)
hda6 - 4GB Swap partition
46GB free space
hda3 - ~3GB partition (system recovery partition or other software from manufacturer)

hdb - 460GB (NTFS)

I've read the tutorial at Fedora - EasyBCD - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki.
Using EasyBCD (which seams a very nice tool, by the way :smile:) I've added an entry in Windows Vista boot loader with GRUB2 for Fedora Linux.
The problem is, when I select Fedora Linux in the Windows Vista boot entries, I end up at a screen with GRUB4DOS...
How do I boot Fedora?

I've searched the forum, and found some similar threads but, I can't find a workaround this... can someone help? Thanks in advance!

More details:
I'm using the latest version of EasyBCD 2.1.2.156, and this are the settings in detailed mode:
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {9dea862c-5cdd-4e70-acc1-f32b344d4795}
device partition=C:
description Windows Boot Manager
locale pt-PT
inherit {7ea2e1ac-2e61-4728-aaa3-896d9d0a9f0e}
default {7e84b7c0-6bb0-11e1-af30-00238b84ca99}
resumeobject {17da7f77-6bb7-11e1-89d1-806e6f6e6963}
displayorder {7e84b7c0-6bb0-11e1-af30-00238b84ca99}
{7e84b7c6-6bb0-11e1-af30-00238b84ca99}
toolsdisplayorder {b2721d73-1db4-4c62-bf78-c548a880142d}
timeout 15
resume No
displaybootmenu Yes
custom:45000001 1
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {7e84b7c0-6bb0-11e1-af30-00238b84ca99}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows Vista (TM) Home Premium
recoverysequence {572bcd55-ffa7-11d9-aae0-0007e994107d}
recoveryenabled Yes
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {17da7f77-6bb7-11e1-89d1-806e6f6e6963}
Real-mode Boot Sector
---------------------
identifier {7e84b7c6-6bb0-11e1-af30-00238b84ca99}
device partition=C:
path \NST\AutoNeoGrub0.mbr
description NeoSmart Linux
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
After many attempts installing Fedora16 in different ways I finally did it.

All the attempts I've made was using one extended partition with several logical partitions inside ("/boot", "/", "/swap", "/home", etc.). I've even tried LVM in that extended partition (except for "/boot" partition of course). I couldn't boot using the menu entry made by EasyBCD.

Before giving up and try to install in the other available disk, I've made a final attempt installing Fedora into a single primary partition. Since there was already 3 primary partitions (used by Windows, recovery, and another for manufacturer software), I had to force the creation of a single primary partition at Fedora install program for the whole Fedora system. When installing I've selected GRUB to remain on this Fedora partition.

This way I was able, back in Windows, to create a working menu entry for Fedora using EasyBCD. For some reason, EasyBCD doesn't seem to work when the linux OS is installed on a logical partition?? Or perhaps, I did something wrong... Funny thing is that either EasyBCD or Windows Disk Managment never detected the extended partition and the logical partitions I've created in Fedora install... Always reported one single partition... Maybe the entry for NeoLinuxOS was trying to load the OS from the extended partition? Instead the logical one? Many questions reveal my ignorance on this subject, I guess I really need to read more about this, since it is quite interesting :grinning:

Anyway, I don't like the idea of a single Linux OS wasting so much space. I will probably try to install Fedora (and other Linux OSes) in the second disk making smaller primary partitions.
 
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