From oldest to newest date of installation, I have on my computer
Windows XP, Fedora 3 and Fedora 7.
I use a Windows program called Bootpart and when I boot up, it offers me
the opportunity to boot up in any of the 3, with Fedora 7 being the default.
If I make no choice, grub runs and then the bootup process gets Fedora 7
going. If I choose Fedora 3, it's the same thing.
Yesterday, I chose Fedora 3 in the evening, ran it and then shut down
overnight. All seemed well.
This morning first thing, I chose Windows XP, ran it and then shut down.
Again, all seemed well.
A short time ago, I turned my computer on and made no choice. I would
therefore have expected to end up in Fedora 7. Instead, I got a grub
prompt. I pressed Ctl-Alt_Del and chose Fedora 3. Again, I got a grub
prompt. I pressed Ctl-Alt-Del again and chose Windows XP. It booted up
properly.
I went on the web and read a bit about grub commands. It seemed that I
should try to issue at the grub prompt the command "kernel /vmlinuz
root=/dev/<the partition where my root directory is>".
I restarted with a live cd and ran fdisk -l. Ignoring a USB external
hard drive, it showed my two internal hard drives, hda and hdb. hda came
with the machine and hdb I installed later. For both of them, hdx1
showed it was bootable and of file system type HPFS/NTFS, while hdx2
said that it was Win95 FAT32 (LBA).
I don't have any proof of this, but I can't imagine I would have
formatted hdb1 as NTFS. In any event, I assumed that hdb2 must be where
some root directory was, so I issued the command appropriately at the
grub prompt. I got error 17, cannot mount selected partition.
I've exhausted my resources, such as they are, and don't know what to do
next.
I'd be very grateful for any help.
Thanks for reading this,
Leslie
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