Hi. I've been following this extremely helpful guide (http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Fedora) to dual boot Vista and Fedora with Vista installed first. I spent most of this past weekend being frustrated at various steps in this process. Highlights include my wrestling with the Vista partitioning tool and my discovery that the latest Ubuntu release is incompatible with my system, for one reason or another.
I moved on to Fedora 12, which was similarly frustrating. I made a LiveCD, but it would hang during the installation process before even getting to the Live Desktop. About to give up, I tried Fedora 11, and to my elation, it worked.
Well, almost. As I was following the above guide, I ran into an issue. When I ticked the box "Review and modify partition layout" during the install, the window would crash. I tried waiting for quite some time to no avail, and if I closed the window, I would be unable to run the installation process again; clicking the icon would result in an icon appearing under the mouse, as if it were working, but then nothing.
Well, being as stubborn as I am, I decided to leave the box unchecked and see what happened, just so I could run Fedora. The installation went fine, I rebooted, and landed on the Fedora 11 desktop.
My problem, of course, is that GRUB overwrote my Windows MBR. I've read that its supposed to chainload Vista. An option for running Vista appeared on startup, but it would result in a crash, presumably because it could no longer find the necessary files. Needing to access files on my Vista partition, I just went ahead and restored the MBR from the Vista disk, which, of course, overwrote GRUB.
tl;dr: I am currently able to boot to Vista only, but Fedora 11 is already installed. I tried to tick the "Review and modify partition layout" box during the Fedora installation, but it resulted in a hang. Is there any way that I can install GRUB to the Fedora partition from Vista and then complete the process in the guide using EasyBCD? Alternatively, can anyone help me with the issues I faced during the Fedora installation so I can complete the process as is?
I am currently running Vista 64 bit, and I only have 1 HDD. I will post system specs if necessary. I am only able to do things from the Vista side, which is probably for the better. I am brand new to Linux, so please be gentle.
Thank you in advance.
I moved on to Fedora 12, which was similarly frustrating. I made a LiveCD, but it would hang during the installation process before even getting to the Live Desktop. About to give up, I tried Fedora 11, and to my elation, it worked.
Well, almost. As I was following the above guide, I ran into an issue. When I ticked the box "Review and modify partition layout" during the install, the window would crash. I tried waiting for quite some time to no avail, and if I closed the window, I would be unable to run the installation process again; clicking the icon would result in an icon appearing under the mouse, as if it were working, but then nothing.
Well, being as stubborn as I am, I decided to leave the box unchecked and see what happened, just so I could run Fedora. The installation went fine, I rebooted, and landed on the Fedora 11 desktop.
My problem, of course, is that GRUB overwrote my Windows MBR. I've read that its supposed to chainload Vista. An option for running Vista appeared on startup, but it would result in a crash, presumably because it could no longer find the necessary files. Needing to access files on my Vista partition, I just went ahead and restored the MBR from the Vista disk, which, of course, overwrote GRUB.
tl;dr: I am currently able to boot to Vista only, but Fedora 11 is already installed. I tried to tick the "Review and modify partition layout" box during the Fedora installation, but it resulted in a hang. Is there any way that I can install GRUB to the Fedora partition from Vista and then complete the process in the guide using EasyBCD? Alternatively, can anyone help me with the issues I faced during the Fedora installation so I can complete the process as is?
I am currently running Vista 64 bit, and I only have 1 HDD. I will post system specs if necessary. I am only able to do things from the Vista side, which is probably for the better. I am brand new to Linux, so please be gentle.
Thank you in advance.
