On 08/16/2009 05:24 PM, Steven Stern wrote:
On 08/16/2009 04:00 PM, Andre Robatino wrote:
My father has a dual-boot Vista/Fedora 11 machine, with Grub on the MBR. He recently enabled recommended updates in Vista, and it wanted him to install SP2, but he was unable to. At Stage 3, after rebooting, it got to 100% but then failed and reverted the changes. The associated error number was 80004005. We found that the source of the problem was that the active partition was the Fedora /boot partition, not the Windows one. By using Vista's Disk Management tool to make the Vista partition active again, the problem was solved. Grub doesn't seem to care which partition is active (at least if it's on the MBR). Looking at old saved fdisk output from 2 of my machines, I suspect that F11 changed the active partition, and that in F10 and earlier, the Windows partition was active. Is this new behavior in the F11 installer (to change the active partition, even though Grub doesn't care), and if so, is it deliberate?
I went through this and the solution is obscure but easy. He needs to change the active partition to the Windows partition. Except for the SP2 install and the ability for Vista to hibernate, neither Vista nor Fedora cares about what partition is flagged as active.
Yes, if you read my message again, you'll see that we already discovered this (except for the Vista hibernation part - does Fedora hibernation care which is active?). My question is, given that this is the case, why does the F11 installer change the active partition if it doesn't have to?
P.S. Prior to discovering this, everything I was able to find with a web search suggested that it was necessary to temporarily replace Grub with Vista's bootloader, then apply SP2, then put Grub back. Maybe that's completely wrong and the only reason it works is that it changes the active partition back to Vista.