Dual boot - Vista and Fedora - How come it works for me?

[gore]

Gore! My PFY

PFY? Someone wants to have an OD of exlax dropped in their coffee and krazy glue added to their butt crack I see

[ArPaNET]

HA that is totally justified for bumping this thread =)

[gore]

The novice guy bumped it, but I had to add that.

[wolfman1984]

Fedora named their latest release "Werewolf" ???? The wolfman didn't know this!

THE WOLFMAN LIKES!!!!!

[n0vic3101]

Well, this is a first time for me... Someone complaining that something works right... But, to please you I can help:

su
rootpassword
cfdisk
delete
enter
rm -rf /*

That should break it for you.

Hi there, I'm not really sure what you mean when you gave me all these directions. I have not installed Fedora yet but I do want to install it. I'm actually looking for steps on how to install Fedora. Thanks again.

[gore]

You put the CD in, reboot, then use the mouse to select English and click the right arrow button on the screen and continue to do so until it reboots after installation.

For dual booting you select the option of use the REST of the HD, and it detects Windows and adds it to the boot manager for you.

You could also look in the "other" tutorials menu, I've amde about 5 or more just for installing Linux and dual booting with Windows.

[zallison]

lmao

Thanks.

[gore]

I do what I can

[IKnowNot]

Ok, I'm late with this one, but:
Are you sure Fedora 8 loaded Grub to the MBR ?

Unlike Windows, Linux is much better at playing nice with other OSs.

When Linux is being placed on a single hard drive with another OS already installed many distros will now detect this and default to installing Grub to the boot partition of the distro rather then the MBR and make that partition bootable ( active. ) ( this can be checked with fdisk after the install: just don't allow it tho change anything! A warning for the novice: fdisk, or as Gore chose, cfdisk, can really break things! If you don't know what you are doing, don't use them! )

( BTW, if a particular distro does not default to doing it this way, just choose the advanced options for Grub when installing the OS and you should be able to choose that option. Or choose the advanced options to see exactly where the distro chose to install Grub, then change as necessary. )

So briefly, if you have say two partitions, the first with Windows and the second with Linux, the BIOS will find Grub on the only bootable ( active ) partition ( the second ), and Grub can give you the choice of which OS to load. If you choose Windows ( on the first partition ) Grub will then try to load it from the MBR which it has not touched, thus making Windows happy.
If you choose Linux, it will avoid the Windows stuff all together.

( This does not work on really old hardware or old versions of Grub )

The easiest way to avoid trouble has always been to install Windows first.
Even if installing on separate drives, install windows on the primary master, then just switch the drives to make the Linux drive primary master.

Any chance this is what happened?