Installing Linux Fedora Core 3 on a Dell Latitude 810m

1. the machine came up with /dev/sda (instead of /dev/hda), kind of odd....
2. sda1=small Dell rescue, sda2=WinXP-Pro in a FAT32
3. we decided to use parted, instead of FIPS (which now seems to be missing from the boot and rescue CDs we had) or PartitionMagic (our normal default, but we'd had to walk 10 steps to get it, i mean, after all, parted is a trusted tool, right?)
4. before you read on, realize that using parted turned out to be a bad decision. I still don't know quite the full story, suffice to say seemingly parted did its job: the FAT32 was smaller, linux installed fine on the new partition, but WinXP didn't boot.....
5. many days, boots and installs later in attempting to avoid wiping XP and the Dell rescue partition, we gave up, decided that parted had somehow trespassed on the XP data because it uses MB addresses instead of cylinders which XP expects, this is roughly how we got it back (along the way liberally saving mbr's in files on the Linux partition for rescue-ability using commands like

    	dd if=/dev/sda of=attempX.mbr bs=512 count=1
   

   • used fdisk to remove sda1 and sda2 and replace them with a big FAT32 sda1
   • in FC3, reformat the disk with mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sda1
   • somewhere in the FC3 /home partition, make a copy of the master boot record (fdisk.mbr) so that we have a working partition table (the last part of the MBR) to reload later (the first part of the MBR is the loader that will be overwritten by grub);
   • re-install XP on this C: drive with the Dell XP disk; XP claimed that the merged partition only had free space equal to the size of the Dell partition on the freshly formatted C: drive, i.e. it appeared to be 99% full, so we used the "reformat as FAT32" option;
   • XP was now working, although it took almost two hours to reload the drivers from the diagnostic + driver disk and the menu is a bit confusing about what needs to be loaded. Turn on hibernation in the power management panel so that the hiberfil.sys hybernation file is created;
   • then boot back into FC3, chroot /mnt/sysimage to gain access to the system, and re-installed grub:

      	chroot /mnt/sysimage
      	grub-install /dev/sda
     

     Look at the /boot/grub/grub.conf file to make sure it looks OK.
   • On rebooting, we find that the grub menu screen is garbled: we can make out and select the two menu options, and XP loads but FC3 does not, so apparently the FC3 boot record has been corrupted.
   • We copied over the MBR again and compared the new partition table with the pre-XP version copied above: we could see differences, implying that now XP is trespassing on the FC3 partition somehow. So we replaced the new MBR record with the post-fdisk version:

            dd if=fdisk.mbr of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
     

   • We tried rebooting cold since the fdisk.mbr still has grub but this did not work so we re-ran grub-install
   • victory!
   Don't ask me to explain all of this.... I suspect the partition table wasn't in good order for the WinXP world, i.e. parted's use of LBA conflicted with XP's use of cylinders (CHS), as others have noted. If i do hear of a better procedure for this , i'll try and ammend this story.

running FC3