I tried dual-booting Fedora Core 3 on my old PC with Windows 98. I created the partition using PartitionMagic (in Windows) -> these were specially created ext3 and swap partitions. FC3 installed fine, but I forgot GRUB. Attempting to re-install FC3 to add GRUB failed (I got errors, more and more every time I tried). The final nail in the coffin was when it reconfigured my machine to boot from the wrong partition, making me panic and think I had formatted the drive by mistake. Trouble is, my partitions can't be converted back at all, or even used. I now have approx. 5Gb of corrupted, unusable (or so it would seem) space on the C:\ drive. I've had reports from other people experiencing drive corruption, even on brand new, unused drives. Others simply say Linux wrecks your machine totally. Did any of you have serious problems setting it up? I've seen it in action and there's a lot going for it, but it's a pain.

Do you have a rescue disk? Windows will be able to fix the MBR (I'm assuming this is what's messed up) so that your pc will boot into the windows partition. Or have you tried this and discovered it doesn't work?

No, I can boot Windows fine (I used fdisk to switch back to my old partition). I'm resigned to the fact that if I want Linux I'll just buy a brand new hard drive. Could do with the space anyway.

Try booting from the CD and getting to the console from there (Alt-F? should work, not sure which one though as it can vary). Then run fdisk a you should be able to fix your partitions.

I haven't used FC3, but unless it's a nasty bug which has crept in (which I *highly* doubt) then no, Linux doesn't hurt your harddrive in any way (well, unless you overwrite an existing partition, but all you do is loose data and not corrupt the drive, but in that case it would probably be your own fault [smile]).

I've never ever seen linux installs screw up anything like you've described.

How did you forget to install grub? Didn't the installation program tell you it was just going to do it?

And what kind of errors are you talking about?

And why would the space be dead? Just use PM to delete those partitions and resize back to the full drive.

so, wait...

You installed fedora, but didn't install GRUB/LILO/etc.

You can still boot into windowz fine, but because you don't have a) a boot disk or b) GRUB/LILO/etc. installed and configured, you can't boot up into FC.

When you tried to completely (right? not just update or whatnot...) you got a bunch of errors, and FC would not install.


Is this correct?

rawrite the first linux installation disk, boot with it and when it propmts you write fexmpl: mount root=/dev/hda2 ro (hda[x] your linux partition).

It got to boot if you actually installed a kernel into that partition.

Quote: Original post by joanusdmentia
Try booting from the CD and getting to the console from there (Alt-F? should work, not sure which one though as it can vary). Then run fdisk a you should be able to fix your partitions.

I haven't used FC3, but unless it's a nasty bug which has crept in (which I *highly* doubt) then no, Linux doesn't hurt your harddrive in any way (well, unless you overwrite an existing partition, but all you do is loose data and not corrupt the drive, but in that case it would probably be your own fault [smile]).

FC2 did have such a nasty bug that's long been fixed.

The fedora people would probably be willing to hear you out if you post the _exact_ error messages and the _exact_ procedure you're doing on bugzilla.redhat.com, selecting fedora core 3 in the product field.

Quote: Original post by etothex
FC2 did have such a nasty bug that's long been fixed.

Not really - it messed up your partition table, but that in itself didn't damage your drive (repartitioning with some programs after this could screw things up, but nothing permanent)