Arch Linux

rusty

Member

Registered: 2008-03-04

Posts: 9

Installation woes

After deciding to build myself a new pc I can't for the life of me install Arch alongside XP.
Mobo - Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H
AMD Athlon 64 x2 5600+
HDD - Seagate 500GB sata2

I configure the setup, try installing GRUB and always end up with a /dev/tty5 error, the one time GRUB did install it wouldn't show XP in it's list.

The harddrive is setup as:

/dev/sda1   XP       ntfs        primary partition   (150GB)  (hd0,0)
/dev/sda4   swap                primary partition   (512MB)
/dev/sda5   /          ext3      logical partition     (15GB)     (hd0,4)
/dev/sda6   /home  ext3      logical partiton      (25GB)

Exactly the same layout as the installation on my old pc yet it won't work...
Ubuntu installs fine, Suse 10.3 warns that there will be an MBR problem and quits

any ideas or pointers to where things might be going wrong?

Statix

Member

From: Hangzhou, China

Registered: 2008-02-16

Posts: 240

Re: Installation woes

I'm not quite sure I exactly understand your problem. Is it that grub won't install on your Archlinux, or it won't write the mbr?

The steps here (assuming all works as it should) would be:

1) Install grub

Then, as root:
grub

From grub's console:
root (hd0,4)
setup (hd0)

This writes the MBR. After that you have to configure grub's menu.

(as root)
nano /boot/grub/menu.lst

The bottom of your file should look something like this:

# (0) Arch Linux
title  Arch Linux
root   (hd0,4)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda5 ro
initrd /kernel26.img

# (1) Arch Linux
title  Arch Linux Fallback
root   (hd0,4)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda5 ro
initrd /kernel26-fallback.img

#Windows XP
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

---

Madly in love with Arch64, Openbox, DotA, and of course... penguins!
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rusty

Member

Registered: 2008-03-04

Posts: 9

Re: Installation woes

To be honest I don't understand it either:/
I had a painless installation of Arch on my old pc.

Firstly it was refusing to write grub to the mbr, I'm not sure what I altered but grub was installed, yet I seemed to have lost XP in the process.
If I selected XP it would show the grub entry, go to stage 2 and then back to the main grub window.

Using the tools on the Arch cd wouldn't let me boot an existing windows, checking the drive with gparted showed an empty partition where windows should be, stating something like: incorrectly formatted ntfs filesystem.

So I'm kind of at a loss right now as to what is wrong, I'm not sure whether it matters or not but I haven't installed SATA drivers in XP.