Hello, im trying to dualboot a linux distro like i used to. in the past i have dualbooted vista and ubuntu,vista and fedora. i couldnt seem to dualboot fedora 11 whic i thought was because of the boot partition. to dualboot i install grub to the boot partition which is normally / and then start up vista and use easybcd to create an entrie on the vista bootloader. but it didnt work for mandriva 2009.1 spring or fedora 11. maybe i put grub on wrong partition by mistake. btw they both use EXT4 so they could be part of the problem but i dono. i may try ubuntu 9.04 later to see. another issue i have is that suddenly both fedora and mandriva tell me sda is corropt and do i want to format it. no i dont want to because its not corropt and contains two ntfs partitions c: and F: C is vista and F: is my data partition. I may grab fedora 10 iso and see if i can install that since i have dual booted that fine before. btw im also asking on the easybcd forums.
For what it's worth, when I dual boot Win and Linux, I always pull the plug on the Win drive entirely before I install Linux. That way it doesn't mess with the Win drive in any way, and the 2 OS's are completely clean and independant. Then to boot, I just use the BIOS menu, for me I hit F10 at boot time and I get my menu, then pick whichever OS/HD I want to boot. I have found this to be the cleanest and easiest way to go.
edit: i solved the problem see here for the solution the problem is that certain distos such as ubuntu later versions and fedora later versions dont install grub correctly. they expect it to be on your first hard drive or the same hard drive as the other operating system you have. I need to find out how to make the change more perminant. atm i have to edit grub everytime i want to boot it. this means that everytime there is a kernel update i will have to edit the new entrie from HD0,1 to HD1,1 then press B to boot.
Maybe try chainloading. In my case Jaunty 9.04 grub is installed to the second hard drive's '/' (I have just # hashed out the timeout i.e. #timeout 6 so that I have time to select the OS I want to boot.) Eg:- title Ubuntu 8.04.2, kernel 2.6.24-24-generic root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-generic root=UUID=491ab32a-2384-4074-b9bb-828eee0f5ca0 ro quiet splash all_generic_ide vga=791 initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-24-generic quiet etc. etc. ### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST title Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty 64 bit root (hd1,0) chainloader +1 ( When running 8.04, I will get kernel updates for 8.04; when running 9.04 I will get kernel updates for 9.04)
I also use EasyBCD to dual boot. The same issue was solved when I used EBCD 2.0 beta, the 2.0 version can handle ext4FS.
