Installing Fedora in Dell D630 laptop

[saswata]

Hi all,
I am using Dell Latitude D630 laptop with preloaded vista OS.Whenever I make partition and install Fedora 6 the Windows unable to boot, Fedora is booting.Can anyone tell me how to partition the HDD for both Vista & Fedora and other installation steps which is important,It is urgent.Please help.

[Kernel_Killer]

Did you make sure that there are two partitions? If the Vista partition still exists, you just need to edit your grub.conf to point to the Windows partition.

Here's a How-to on how to accomplish that. It's for Ubuntu, but will work fine for Fedora.

Vista and Linux Dual-Boot

[saswata]

Did you make sure that there are two partitions? If the Vista partition still exists, you just need to edit your grub.conf to point to the Windows partition.

Here's a How-to on how to accomplish that. It's for Ubuntu, but will work fine for Fedora.

Vista and Linux Dual-Boot

Actually there is two parition one for vista & other for LINUX.But there is also another partition named recovery.I not format that partition.Now the problem is I can't locate where the vista is installed.I have checked with fdisk -l command and it shows the NTFS partition.Now you suggest me which partition I will define for vista.....this is my problem...

[debianfoo]

Actually there is two parition one for vista & other for LINUX.But there is also another partition named recovery.... the problem is I can't locate where the vista is installed.I have checked with fdisk -l command and it shows the NTFS partition.Now you suggest me which partition I will define for vista.....this is my problem...

Hello saswata,
windows is always installed on the c:\ drive which is the 1st part ever, the 2nd next to c:\ is the D:\ being left by Dell for backup. You can always resize the D:\ with no problem as well as the c: \ no need to leave to much space for Win, so from Fedora you should see C:\ windows as hda1 and then the next one as hda2 both are on the main and only HD or hd0 (in the pc)

so, if you list your /dev and look for the hd drives:

ls -l /dev | grep hd
you should see:
hda1
hda2
hda3 (I suppose now Fedora / root, if you left it to Fedora)
I'll log on later from my thinkpad to give you the next instructions to edit your /boot/grub/grub.conf file which should start Windows from Fedora start menu.
bye,

[debianfoo]

edit your /boot/grub/grub.conf file which should start Windows from Fedora start menu.
bye,

first cp your grub.conf file to your home dir
logged as root:
su
# chmod 644 /boot/grub/grub.conf make the file writtable
# cp /boot/grub/grub.conf grub1 copy it to your home dir

you can then open it and edit it by adding these lines below the Fedora entries found on your grub.conf (you can do this from your desktop), to learn how to work on the console is also a good thing.
you must copy exactly the entries below, only replacing xp with vista, although it would start anyway as this is just a title... appearing on the starting menu.
root (hd0,0) is hda1 equivalent to the C:\ drive in Windows.
hd0 is the primary master drive on your motherboard. the second 0 means the 1st partition on that drive, which is C:\ partition. (hd0,0)
so this below is what you should add below to the Fedora entries:
lines starting with # are comments.


# This entry automatically added by the Debian/fedora installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/hda1
title Microsoft Windows XP Professional or Vista for that matter...
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1
# end of your entry for vista

before hand, you can take a look at your /dev

~$ ls -l /dev/hd*
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 0 2007-11-27 18:52 /dev/hda
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 1 2007-11-27 18:52 /dev/hda1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 2 2007-11-27 18:52 /dev/hda2
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 3 2007-11-27 18:52 /dev/hda3
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 4 2007-11-27 18:52 /dev/hda4
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 5 2007-11-27 18:52 /dev/hda5
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 6 2007-11-27 18:52 /dev/hda6
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 7 2007-11-27 18:52 /dev/hda7
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 8 2007-11-27 18:52 /dev/hda8
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 9 2007-11-27 18:52 /dev/hda9
brw-rw---- 1 root cdrom 22, 0 2007-11-27 18:52 /dev/hdc



and a look at the partitions logged as root with fdisk -l
thinkdebian:/home/eniz# fdisk -l

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 1176 9438187 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 * 1177 1260 674730 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 1261 1929 5373742+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 1930 4864 23575387+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 1930 2598 5373711 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 2599 3327 5855661 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 3328 3462 1084356 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda8 4166 4864 5614686 83 Linux
/dev/hda9 3463 4165 5646816 83 Linux

from above you can see that on my thinkpad, I have resized the windows partition (hda1) to 9GB, and my hda2 is debian /boot partition while hda3 is /

your fstab file shows partitions/drives mounted at bootime

thinkdebian:/home/eniz# more /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda2 /boot ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hda6 /shared ext3 user_xattr 0 2
/dev/hda5 /usr ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/hda7 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

so once you've edited your fedora grub1 file, you have to copy it to it's original place to /boot/grub/grub.conf where it's going to replace the original

cp -i grub1 /boot/grub/grub.conf
overwrite grub.conf ? y/n

you can now reboot
# /sbin/shutdown -r now

and when the system reboots, the new edited Fedora menu should include:
Microsoft Vista (option)

[saswata]

Thanks...It really working ..thanks a lot..