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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.

http://www.sterndata.com/category/tags/sp2

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Steve

On Sun, 2009-08-16 at 17:36 -0400, Andre Robatino wrote:

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.

http://www.sterndata.com/category/tags/sp2

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.

Generally, for dual boot machines, I install grub in /boot and make it active. That way, I haven't touched the MBR. In case warranty service is needed (or apparently in case of the Vista SP2 update, etc.), I can just change the active partition and Windows boots as though there's nothing else on the machine.

In the past, at least, that had to be done with a rescue disk after the Fedora install, because Fedora did not change the active partition. In fact, I filed a bug at one point requesting that the user have the option to change the active partition during the install if he didn't use the default boot record. It was closed WONTFIX. I'm pretty sure the default is still to install grub in the MBR and not to change the active partition.

The active partition must be one with grub installed. If you install grub in /boot and not in MBR, then /boot must be active, and vice versa. If you somehow get grub installed in both places, then either can be active, but you need to be careful to coordinate switching active partitions and updating grub.

When I installed F11 over F10 configured with /boot active, specifying /boot as the target for grub, it did not change the active partition.

On Sun, 2009-08-16 at 17:36 -0400, Andre Robatino wrote:

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?

It might be the drive partitioner, rather than grub, doing it. There's two things you'd have to check on.

It might be important for some BIOSs which partition(s) are active, but it hasn't mattered on computers I've played with in the past, as far as I can recall.

It's possibly even more important regarding hibernation, or more to the point, waking up from hibernation. I've messed around, a bit, with dual boot. And hiberating one OS, then another, it doesn't always resume the Windows hibernation, but the Linux one always resumed (and without any GRUB menu popping up for me to decide whether to resume this OS or that.

Can anyone on a dual-boot Windows/Linux box with Grub on the MBR and the Windows partition active, who's about to clean-install F11, check afterwards if the active partition has changed?

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On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 16:02, Andre Robatino andre@bwh.harvard.edu wrote:

Can anyone on a dual-boot Windows/Linux box with Grub on the MBR and the Windows partition active, who's about to clean-install F11, check afterwards if the active partition has changed?