Dual boot doesn't work

OK. . . What a pain in the neck this is. Don't kill me, but this is my first FC installation. I have a Compac (P4) system with XP loaded on the master boot disk. I installed FC5 on the slave disk. . .

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OK...
 
What a pain in the neck this is. Don't kill me, but this is my first FC installation.
 
I have a Compac (P4) system with XP loaded on the master boot disk. I installed FC5 on the slave disk... and zippo I just booted into XP.
 
I tried pulling the XP drive... and i got Error loading operating System...(I assume it never installed a boot loader).
 
So I swapped the drives in the bays and reinstalled. Now I can run FC5 but I can't get to XP ( It's listed as "Other" in GRUB... and trying to load it gives me a Noverify line and a chainloader + 1 command... but I get no XP.
 
Someone posted a script... but it didn't work.
 
I tried booting of the CD and performing an upgrade to change the boot loader configuration.. but everytime I try it says "no kernel installed.. your boot loader configuration will not be changed"
 
Now one thing I did notice was that in order to get the installation to even run I had to type linux acpi=off just to get it to install.
 
I would be infinitely greatful if anyone had any ideas... and then maybe we could send it to Fedora so they can post some accurate installation instructions.... the install guide is worthless.
 
 
 

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I think what the Fedora site needs is some warnings about how to do the installations in general on a second hard drive. Please bear with me, as there are multiple posts on this issue (..and I mean multiple posts).
 
One more time. If you are installing Fedora, or any other linux OS on a second slave hard drive, you can't accept the default options to install. Any Linux OS assumes that you have one hard drive in the system. Installing on a second drive is fine, but you have to change the Grub bootloader to match the system. Accepting the default options installs grub on the same drive that you did the installation on, not the drive you are booting from when the system starts.
 
So, your system has the XP bootloader on the primary master and the bootloader for Fedora on the master slave.
 
The system is booting from the primary maseter and has no idea that you have grub on the second drive, unless you tell it so. It boots into Windows directly, as there is no grub bootloader on the primary master drive for Linux, or anything that can boot Fedora,
 
 
Please stop trying to install Fedora with the drives changed to different cables and boot orders. This screws up the system.
 

Quote:So I swapped the drives in the bays and reinstalled. Now I can run FC5 but I can't get to XP ( It's listed as "Other" in GRUB... and trying to load it gives me a Noverify line and a chainloader + 1 command... but I get no XP.  
Correct. Now what you have done is changes the physical designation of the drives, The former slave drive is now master, but XP does not boot, because the XP boot.ini file, which grub invokes, is pointing to the wrong drive. It thinks that XP is still on the primary master. It is now on the primary slave.
 

Quote:Someone posted a script... but it didn't work. 
What script are you referring to? We have no idea what you are talking about, unless you tell us. It would be helpul if you could tell us what exact "script" you used and how you tried to invoke it.
 

Quote:I tried booting of the CD and performing an upgrade to change the boot loader configuration.. but everytime I try it says "no kernel installed.. your boot loader configuration will not be changed"  
You can't do an upgrade installation. There is nothing to upgrade. Upgrade refers to moving from one version of Fedora to another newer one.
 
Put the drives back into their correct order. There is no need to change the physical drive orders.
 
Before we go any further, do you have the full installation CD for XP, or just the recovery disks from Compaq?
 
...and please, stick to this thread when discussing the issue. You tagged onto another post that I just saw that gives me more information, but we need to keep all the information on one thread.