Fedora :: Can't Launch Restore Partition On Dual Boot?
Mar 10, 2011
Problem concerns HP laptop running XP and Fedora 13 and using Grub2. When installed the grub became the primary bootloader. I have been unable to successfully use any of the common fixes to reload the windows bootloaderWindows install has been unable to reload the windows bootloader. With the grub being primary I cannot access the factory restore partition.Is there a way to disable the grub and force the machine to the restore partition or use a recovery distro to run it? I have tried Knoppix but was unable to access the partition. I am still a linux wbie and understand I may be missing something simple but have yet to resolve the issue and need help. I need to reformat the machine and will run linux from an external usb. At this point all data is backed up and I am open for any options.
I have tried to access the MBR directly but fixing it is beyond my current skill level.Additional details: Initial linux install along-side XP was Mint 9. It completely wiped out the bootloader and failed to install properly. Installed Fedora and it reloaded the grub and fixed the bootloader which allowed the machine to boot and function with both OS's.
I have recently setup a dual boot system that consist of Windows Vista and Fedora 12, I am looking for a solution that will allow me to create an entire restore image for both OS's on an external hard drive. I am looking for something that is easy to use, stable, and free. I have looked at clonezilla and have used Norton ghost 2003 in the past which is not supported with Windows Vista.
I did a fresh install of Ubuntu Karmic on a separate partition the other day, and mistakenly formatted the dedicated boot partition. This has left the boot entry in Fedora's fstab incorrect, and - obviously - removed the initrd and vmlinuz images for Fedora from the boot partition. Is there any way to reinstate these? Someone on the Ubuntu forums recommended chrooting into the Fedora partition, but I'm not sure I understand how that works. It's my own stupid fault for formatting the boot partition, but we live and learn!
There are way too many answers from archives on this so I decided to ask it again to maybe remove the confusion, for me and others. I had Vista and Ubuntu as dual boot, something ate my Vista doc settings folder (probably me). I want to reinstall it. It won't because of the set up in the grub I guess. I am not a serious Linux command line person but do follow directions well. Is there some somewhat easy way for me to restore my Vista?
I am aware of Win 7 etc. I have a Dell laptop so want to use the Dell restore CD. I am not alone in this. I run into people all over with a similar problem.
I'm trying to achieve my dream (but indeed not perfect) boot scenario: dual-boot OpenSUSE and Fedora with shared /boot, /home and SWAP partitions. First I installed OpenSUSE (sda3 on my layout below) with separate /boot (sda2), /home (sda5, encrypted) and SWAP (sda6), next I installed Fedora on /dev/sda1, and pointed it to mount sda2, sda5, sda6 with respective mount points, without formatting. I proceeded with the installation without installing new GRUB bootloader (overwriting an existing one).
It was successfull and now I'm back in OpenSuSE trying to edit menu.lst file (under /boot/grub) to make GRUB boot Fedora.
I attached a copy of menu.lst I cooked up for now. OK, it's a mess. Life would be allot easier if I didn't have a separate /boot partition, as I could just chainload, but it's no longer possible (or is it?). May be I needed to specify the resume device or problem is in initrd? below are the contents of /boot:
--all was well but after some messing around with a failed Backtrack install I had to repartition some things to clean it up
--The partition where Backtrack was installed was corrupt so I deleted it and extended my Ubuntu partition.
--reload got the no such partition rescue grub
--read threw a bunch of forums and could only seem to find mostly threads on only being able to load Ubuntu and not Windows. Most having to do with post OS install problems and not re partitioning.
--I decided the best thread to follow was [url]
--after that my memory of events is a bit fuzzy, a lot was going on. In short I got a message in the terminal saying "this is a BAD idea" and something about another MBR. (sorry I cant be more specific)
--reading on I decided I would try my windows bootloader restore
--now windows loads up fine but it doesn't even give me an option to boot Ubuntu. I launched a live CD and checked GParted. The partition is still there.
Sorry if this is threaded somewhere already, I know that annoying. I'm just burnt out on combing forums and broke down and decided to ask directly
I have a computer with windows xp on it, and i want to dual boot with fedora 11. I have 2 hard drives in it, 1 500gb HD and 1 350gb HD. the 350 isnt much concern b/c its just sitting there all free and unpartitioned right now. Now my 500gb is split into 3 partitions, a 20gb(with xp installed on it) a 105 gb with pretty much nothing on it and a 350gb with all my data.
My problem is I'm trying to resize my 20gb partition through the fedora 11 installer and when I tell it to resize say to 10gb it starts and fails the resize. its a NTFS partition and the windows stuff on the partition is only about 8gb. any idea whats going on? the only error I get is "The resize has failed"
Edit: I have a Sony Vaio FJ170 laptop with Phoenix BIOS version R0060X6 & a broken DVD Drive. The BIOS doesn't support booting from USB (it does have 'External Drive Boot' option, but my USB stick doesn't get listed under boot devices in BIOS when connected to the laptop).
A few days ago I upgraded to Windows7, then installed Lucid through WUBI. With the help of another thread of mine (here), I changed the default boot option & timeout of Windows to zero to directly boot into Ubuntu. So far it was good. But recently I tried to get back to Windows for some reason but could not succeed as the F8 key no longer brings up the Window's Advance Boot Menu.
Is there another way to restore the dual boot menu timeout to get back to the Windows installation. Or even better, is there some way to make a fresh install of Windows & Ubuntu side-by-side without DVD drive. I am only 14 and absolutely new to Linux. The network booting methods given on the Internet were too complex for me to understand. I like Ubuntu but also need Windows for programming C++ & Photoshop CS4.
is it possible to use a Windows-based recovery partition on a dual-boot computer to overwrite the Ubuntu partition and remove the GRUB loader? For instance, if you booted up your computer, accessed the hidden recovery partition and used it to reset the computer to it's factory default settings, would that effectively remove the Ubuntu partition and the GRUB loader? Would a completely new installation of Windows overwrite/uninstall Ubuntu and GRUB automatically?
After installing karmic with Grub2 I am unable to boot into Archlinux partition. Grub2 has removed the last line of the Archlinux boot stanza! It used to read:-
[Code]....
Following the Grub2 tutorials I have tried editing /etc/grub.d/40_custom as follows:-
[Code]....
But no luck. Only way into Archlinux is to get into the edit shell and manually add the missing line and remove other stuff not needed. I have spent hours trying to resolve this issue and I am fairly p----d off
I have a vista machine I recently put FC10 on. Through the course of figuring out wireless drivers, I goofed it enough that I was told to simply reinstall linux. I had the fedora GRUB file set as I wanted. But after I re-installed FC10 it would just hang after it searched for bootable CDs and stuff. I got the super grub CD and am able to boot into windows no issue. HOWEVER, when I select the fedora option, I get
"Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition"
I assume this means the grub doesn't know where my Linux boot stuff is. I have a separate drive dedicated to the linux install. The Vista drive is where the MBR is. So... how do I tell the grub where the FC10 install is? I've tried to reinstall FC10 twice hoping I just goofed something. edit: The standard grub file was in /boot/grub or something. Is there a file I can edit to point in the right direction?
I ve got a dual boot, XP and FC 12 on a single harddrive. After defragmentation of NTFS partition (With XP installation) cant'boot linux So, rub statrts with boot menu after selecting linux it tries to load linux but prints out some messages again and again (I do not remember contetn of messages) And these messages are circulating
I want to partiton my hdd so I can dual boot XP SP3 & Ubuntu 9.10. Currently I just made 1 partition (NTFS) on 1 320GB hdd. And I need to make a partition for ubuntu.tutorials for this? Also I'd rather not have to use 3rd party tools for this.And just a quick question, after I do this, will the files be sharable between the 2 os's. Provided the file type can be used in both.
I have a dual boot win 7 ubuntu 10.10 setup. Didn't update ubuntu for about 6 weeks but then did all updates at once, after that, ubuntu wouldn't boot. Is there anyway I can ubuntu and recover my data?
Ran Karmic for a while in a wubi installation with XP. Very unstable, lots of headaches at inopportune times. Now I'd like to try separate partitions so Windows might leave Ubuntu alone and not nibble it away as it did under the wubi installation. Here is my current partition status:
I'm trying to understand how I can partition my hard disk to allow for a dual boot (Windows & Ubuntu) as well as allow access to a certain set of files from both Windows & Ubuntu. So far I understand that I'll need:
1 Windows boot partition ~2-4GB 1 Linux boot partition ~2-4GB 1 Linux swap partition ~1-2 GB
But I don't know:How can I keep my non-boot linux files & folders -- /home, /usr, etc. -- separate from the boot files? Do I need another partition? If yes, what size & format -- FAT32, ext3, etc. -- should it be? If I separate, for instance, the "/home" folder only where do the remaining folders and files reside? How can I access certain files with both Windows & Ubuntu? Do I need yet another partition, formatted in FAT32?
I would like to install XP to /dev/sda5,sda6 being karmic. (I may have a dying dvd burner as was unable to install it yesterday but..) I got in a dreadful mess with grub after attempting to upgrade to Lucid,I needed to reinstall anyway. Will I be able to dual boot or should I just start from scratch?
I'm running UbuntuStudio 9.10 on my Toshiba Satellite A40 Laptop... it's perfect and I love it... but, I installed it cleanly doing a reformat of the drive, and with no partition - so using as much of the newly replaced 80gb drive as possible.Now, if I want to create a partition to install WinXP as a dual boot, 1) can this be done? 2) what do I use to do it?
I am already using ubuntu 9.10 for over six months but now i want make my system dual boot with windows as well. How do i do it. there are no partitions on my HDD all current space is dedicated to ubuntu only.
I have a dual boot and every program I try to clone the ubuntu partition seems to want to have the entire hard drive to clone to.In other words, if I attach an external hard drive and select the ext4 Ubuntu Linux to clone to a purposefully made ext4 partition in an external drive - every program wants to copy to the entire external hard drive.Any suggestions?I think that clonezilla allows more freedom but I just dont quite get it - the options seem a little confusing in that I am worried that I will copy the partition back to my actual machine.
I am probably being a bit paranoid, but if anyone can think of a simple program that allows me to simply copy one partition to another purpose made (external) partition then please let me know!!
I have windows xp on dual boot, however I do not use it anymore also something happened to the boot sector so now it wont work. I want to remove it so that I can have ubuntu reclaim the partition and have grub removed from startup. How does one do this?
I have 10.10 installed on a Compaq laptop and want to set it up as a dual boot machine. I'm not sure how to 1) set up another partition 2) set up the dual boot and 3) install my second operating system. I'm sure that this is a pretty vanilla thing to do and am frustrated after trying to find out how to do it for a bit now.
System Layout: Alienware M17 Laptop 2.26 GHz Quad-Core CPU 4.0 GB DDR3 RAM
Hard Drive #1: Toshiba 500 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive #2: Toshiba 100 GB 7200 RPM
What I was thinking of doing was putting Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) and Ubuntu 9.10 (64-bit) on the 100 GB hard drive - with just under a 75/25 split towards W7 (approximately 70 GB for W7 and 22 GB for Ubuntu). Would this be optimal, having the operating systems on one drive separate from nearly everything else?
Another question that I was unsure about with this setup was the swap area. It doesn't need to be on the same HDD as the running OS to be utilized, does it?
Also, any partition size adjustment recommendations.
I know this is a familiar looking question, but please hear me out.
I want to dual boot Fedora 15 with Ubuntu 11.04 (to try out GNOME Shell whilst not breaking Unity, which I quite like). As it's mostly to just to try out, I'll probably want to remove Fedora and go back to just Ubuntu, so I wan to ask how to remove the Fedora partition without doing any damage, and how to remove it from the GRUB menu at boot.
I'd like to clone a partition, and then restore it to a logical volume. I have all three operating systems at my disposal (Mac, Windows, Linux Live CD) What is the best way to achieve this. The partition I am trying to resize is only 200MB, so I can store it on usb if need be.
I am new to linux. I tried and failed. I need some help on Creating patitions (I think it is root, swap and home).I have HP laptop with WIndows 7 installed. I have shrink the volume to allow Linux installation. I have three partitions, first one is windows boot - about 100MB. Second one is about 110GB and it has windows 7. Third one is UNALLOCATED space of 110GB that I intended for Suse.
Now I am going to install the Suse. The unallocated spaces should be "primary" or "extended"? Also, should I divided this new partition in to three partition? If does, what are sizes for each? I want to learn Linux so I will able to look for better job. This is the first time I ever look into linux and confused.
I must say that until now I have worked with Win2000/Xp. Long time ago I worked with Xenix and in the last 2 month sometimes with Ubuntu.Now I have brought a new PC with 320Gb HD and 4 Gb RAM, and I wish to built a dual boot system, with Win7 and Ubuntu.
Absolute newbie to Linux (assume I'm a complete dummyhead. I don't understand anything about Linux.). Just bought 500GB HDD. Made 3 partitions, 1 for Linux, 1 for Windows, and 1 for data.
1st, installed Win XP on 2nd partition (NTFS) Then installed 64-Bit Ubuntu on 1st partition (Ext4) (Created a 2 GB partition and for the swap file.)
Not sure which partition is primary, extended, etc., never really understood all that stuff anyways. XP was working perfectly, till I installed Ubuntu. Now, it just boots straight into Ubuntu, doesn't give the option to boot into XP. Tried everything I know, but it will not give the option to go into XP.
