Okay, a generous community member has been so kind as to write a summary document outlining prevention and recovery on systems where the infamous harddrive geometry installer bug causes problems with XP dual booting. Please, read over the attached document and test the preventative and recovery methods outlined. Suggestions on useful textual edits and corrections to make before this is widely broadcast are welcome. This is important enough of an issue to make sure the information in here is non-toxic before we broadcast a version of this widely, the goal being to prevent all unncessary dataloss. Of particular interest: 1)test the preventative measure if you still have access to a machine where this is a problem. Prevention is always better, if it can be done reliably. 2)finding a better workaround stdisk warning messages that are being produced that intefere with simple sfdisk command pipe recovery. -jef"Die CHS Die!"spaleta ------------------->Begin Summary Document Text<---------------------------- Dual Booting Issues With Fedora Core 2 and Windows: Prevention & Recovery NOTICE: Please read this document in its entirety. This guide was inspired by the solution developed by Radu Cornea and Alexandre Oliva in this thread: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-May/msg02114.html . This guide aims to integrate the original solution with the refinements evolved in that thread. This guide offers an explanation of why the refinements are beneficial and some workarounds to problems that may prevent the uninitiated from using the solution. It also provides a means of preventing the problem entirely. Primer: There is a bug in Fedora Core 2 that causes the hard disk geometry as reported in the partition table to be altered during installation. This change may cause Windows boot failure. Although this bug is severe, it is recoverable and no data should be lost. It is important not to panic if and when this happens so you do not cause further problems or cause actual loss of data in the process of recovering from the error. Prevention: This bug can be avoided entirely by using some preventative steps while installing Fedora Core 2. Thanks go out to Cero (cero@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) for discovery and testing of this solution. To avoid the hard disk geometry to be altered you may enter it manually during installation by using the hdN=<drive geometry> parameter (where N is the letter representing the drive with the MBR you will use). To discover the current geometry before installing Fedora Core 2 you should use a utility that can read the drive geometry as reported in the partition table=
