Micro$will's Journal: FC2 Mayhem

I decided to install Fedora Core 2 on my Windows machine, despite warnings from the community about it trashing the MBR, since I usually install the boot loader to the first sector of the root partition and use the NT boot loader to bring up Linux. In addition, I used SuSE Live CD 9.1 to partition and format my swap and root, so there would be no reason for Fedora to touch the MBR. Sounds like it would work, right? Nope.

Abit BH7
P4 3.06 with 533 Mhz bus
512 MB Crucial PC2700
ATI Radeon 9500
Maxtor 20GB Drive, autodetected

"NTLDR Missing" is the only thing I get. I boot the XP install disk again and go to repair console and try everything. FIXBOOT, FIXMBR, BOOTCFG, nothing works. I boot a 98SE rescue disk, I can see NTLDR with attrib, but it won't run. WTF?

I give up shooting blind and search Google and go to the first hit, some O'Reilly weblog with a similar rant as mine. He didn't have the fix, but a comment there reminded me of one I saw when the issue was first exposed on /.: set the drive from autodetect to LBA. It works, and I go about cleaning up my boot.ini and playing with FC2.

Bedides kernel 2.6.5 which I already installed on a Core 1 machine, I see nothing special about FC2. It still has no visible movie player, no mp3 support, and they've butchered KDE to look like Gnome. It seems the higher the version number gets, the more bloated Red Hat/Fedora gets, and the more features dissapear. I find myself spending more time installing stuff like Xmms and Xine than I do installing the OS.