Installing GRUB after installing Linux on a second drive
I finally got around to installing Linux on my desktop PC. I had problems installing it on the same physical harddrive as Windows, so I forked out $100 for a new SATA 250GB drive.
I got the drive a couple of days ago and started installing Fedora Core 5. About 45 minutes later, I rebooted the system and to my dismay it booted directly into Windows. I realized that I may have gone through the installation process a little to quickly and forgot to change the setting to put the bootloader on the first disc.
I am considerably new to Linux and wasn’t sure how to install GRUB bootloader so that it started instead of Windows. All you have to do is use any bootable Linux disc, in this case I just used the same DVD I that installed Fedora with, and at the boot prompt before the installation begins you type the following:
boot: linux rescue
It then proceeds to ask you a couple of general localization questions. The installer will attempt to locate your partition that contains Linux. Once it does, it will mount it to the /mnt/sysimage directory. Once it does that, it will take you to a command prompt. Simply type the following at the prompt to change the root to your Linux install:
# chroot /mnt/sysimage
Once you have done that you need to type the following. NOTE: I am using sda in this example because I have a serial ata drive. If you have an IDE drive then you would use hda:
# grub-install /dev/sda
Unfortunately this did not work for me as I got this error:
/dev/sdb1 does not have any corresponding BIOS drive
After searching for the solution I found out I had to add a parameter to the install:
# grub-install --recheck /dev/sda
Once I did that and rebooted, it showed me my GRUB bootloader which worked for both my Windows and Linux installations. It was perfect.
Related reading:
May the penguin bestow blessings upon you head!
I am new to the Linux world and was having serious problems with FC6 not loading properly. Your blog was great! I now have W2k on one drive and FC6 on the other and both boot fine. Now, off to learning this OS.
Jerry
Haha! Jerry, thanks for posting the comment. I wondered if this post was actually helpful to anyone, because it was certaily helpful to me
Glad to hear you got it working. Now go have fun!
-Kyle
Many thanks for this!!!
Just bought a new HP Pavilion dv9000 -laptop which have two sata disks and windows media center installed on the first one.
I installed fedora core 6 on the other one but no option to boot into fedora appeared. I followed your instructions and now it works like a charm..
One issue remain. Why are there two fedora core options in the boot menu?
fedora core…
fedore core .. up
Glad to hear I was able to help! I believe the -up option stands for uniprocessor. Fedora allows for either SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) or a single processor. Hope this helps.
If you don’t want to see this option in the menu than you can simply edit either /etc/grub.conf or /etc/lilo.conf depending on what bootloader you are using.
Helped me out too, thanks. During the install of FC5, I wondered why Anaconda wanted to put GRUB on sda. I told it not to, because I had that whole drive partitioned for XP, and I feared it
would overwrite some essential part of the Windows boot. It seems like the fix given above reverses that and does in fact put GRUB on sda. Does this mean that the Master Boot Record is somehow
independent of operating system? Why couldn’t Anaconda make a new MBR on the second hard disk, sdb? On the other hand, who cares? It works
Thank you so much for putting this piece of info on the internet. I had the exact same problem and just couldn’t figure out where it went wrong. But this solves it, awesome!
Cheers.
First hit on google for me and it worked right away. Thanks so much!
Awesome glad to hear!!!
Another happy customer! It is great to find clear directions for my exact problem that work!!
I am thrilled to hear that this post is still helping people out! I haven’t had Linux installed on any of my systems for quite some time now, and forgot what the problem was all about anyway
Thanks for the help on this critical issue. I was searching around google for this exact same problem, and strangely, the ubuntu forums didn´t have any solutions. This did the trick. Gracias!
I am glad to hear that this post is still helping people!
Thanks for the help with installing grub!
haha! Glad to here it is still helpful!
Thanks a lot, i have the same problem, and now i resolve it
greetings from italy
P.S. LINUX POWER!!