After "googling" around for about an hour, I've still had little success
with setting up Fedora-Redhat (Core 2, which I downloaded in ISO mirrored
form a few days ago from the site). On startup, I keep getting the message
"Operating System Not Found".

From what I've read, this problem could arise from not marking the main
partition as active (fdisk shows mine is so marked), or from Bios problems
(mine is pointing OK to the hard drive). The system has been installed on
the primary partition of the hard drive (the recovery disk has located it).

I am running this on an HP Pavilion 633 Mhz with 192 Meg RAM. Previously, I
had installed Windows 2000, and it worked fine on the hard drive (and the
computer).The primary Hard Drive is a 15 gig Western Digital, in LBA format
(according to the bios).

Any ideas ? Any thoughts appreciated.

John S (AKA frustrated)

John S <praxis-j@videotron.ca> wrote:
> After "googling" around for about an hour, I've still had little success
> with setting up Fedora-Redhat (Core 2, which I downloaded in ISO mirrored
> form a few days ago from the site). On startup, I keep getting the message
> "Operating System Not Found".

You haven't written a boot record to point at the kernel of your
installation. You DID install it, no? You don't say.

> From what I've read, this problem could arise from not marking the main
> partition as active

Irrelevant. Only msdos master boot record take notice of which
partition is marked active and jup to the boot sector on that partition.
You will have replaced the mdos MBR ages ago, no?

Peter

My intent is to create a pure linux machine for a Apache / Tomcat / mySQL
installation. I already have these runnig under Windows 2000 (on a different
machine). In all honesty, I am a complete neophite with linux (so be
gentle).

I simply followed the Fedora installation (which includes provisions for a
boot loader); obviously I must have missed something (a boot record was NOT
included in the installation discs?). I installed nothing other than the
four discs (each containing an ISO file). I'll keep looking on Google, but
hints would be helpful!

John S.


"P.T. Breuer" <ptb@oboe.it.uc3m.es> wrote in message
newsl3p22-vs3.ln1@triangulo.it.uc3m.es...
> John S <praxis-j@videotron.ca> wrote:
> > After "googling" around for about an hour, I've still had little success
> > with setting up Fedora-Redhat (Core 2, which I downloaded in ISO
mirrored
> > form a few days ago from the site). On startup, I keep getting the
message
> > "Operating System Not Found".
>
> You haven't written a boot record to point at the kernel of your
> installation. You DID install it, no? You don't say.
>
> > From what I've read, this problem could arise from not marking the main
> > partition as active
>
> Irrelevant. Only msdos master boot record take notice of which
> partition is marked active and jup to the boot sector on that partition.
> You will have replaced the mdos MBR ages ago, no?
>
> Peter

one partition needs to be flagged bootable but I think that should be
done by the installation. Did you have an option where to install grub
or lilo? The MBR would probably be a good choice. If everything went
ok with the install you probably just need to reinstall grub or lilo

John S wrote:
> After "googling" around for about an hour, I've still had little
> success
> with setting up Fedora-Redhat (Core 2, which I downloaded in ISO
> mirrored form a few days ago from the site). On startup, I keep
> getting the message "Operating System Not Found".

Did you get any error messages during installation? Did you choose to
install the boot loader (GRUB) in the MBR?

> From what I've read, this problem could arise from not marking the
> main partition as active (fdisk shows mine is so marked),

GRUB doesn't care about active partition markings.

--
Markku Kolkka
markku.kolkka@iki.fi

Thanks for the response.

I did install the boot loader (GRUB) to the MBR, and didn't get any error
messages. I'm starting to suspect problems with the Western Digital Hard
Drive.

I have a sense that the GRUB.CONF file did not install (though my use of
linux commands is suspect). This is starting to get stupid: I may well
repartition the hard drive, reinstall Windows 2000, reinstall fedora-redhat,
and try using GRUB's dual boot option.

Who says life's easy!


John S.


"Markku Kolkka" <markku.kolkka@iki.fi> wrote in message
news:cje8nu$g84$1@phys-news1.kolumbus.fi...
> John S wrote:
> > After "googling" around for about an hour, I've still had little
> > success
> > with setting up Fedora-Redhat (Core 2, which I downloaded in ISO
> > mirrored form a few days ago from the site). On startup, I keep
> > getting the message "Operating System Not Found".
>
> Did you get any error messages during installation? Did you choose to
> install the boot loader (GRUB) in the MBR?
>
> > From what I've read, this problem could arise from not marking the
> > main partition as active (fdisk shows mine is so marked),
>
> GRUB doesn't care about active partition markings.
>
> --
> Markku Kolkka
> markku.kolkka@iki.fi

John S wrote:

> I simply followed the Fedora installation (which includes provisions for a
> boot loader); obviously I must have missed something (a boot record was
> NOT included in the installation discs?). I installed nothing other than
> the four discs (each containing an ISO file). I'll keep looking on Google,
> but hints would be helpful!

You said that the recovery disk (by which I take it you mean
Fedora disk #1 in rescue mode) worked,
in which case there cannot be too much wrong with your system.

Using the rescue disk, try re-installing grub.
After "chroot /mnt/sysimage" look at /etc/grub.conf
and make sure it looks for the right partition.
(You would get the "OS not found" error message
if it was looking at the wrong partition.)
Assuming grub.conf is correct,
say "grub-install --recheck /dev/hda",
and see if it works now.


--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland