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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) Description of problem: I have a Dell Dimension 8300 which has a FAT partition for Dell Utility which has a diagnostics program. I installed Fedora Core 1. If I press the appropriate function key to get into the Dell Utility Partition upon turning on the computer, it goes into GRUB and I can only choose between the OS's that are part of Grub and if I try to go into Windows XP Pro, for example it gives an error message upon trying to boot since the computer was expecting to go right into the Dell Utility Partition. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Turn on Dell computer 2. Press F12 to get into setup screen 3. Select option to boot into utility partition Additional info:
You probably need to add the (possibly hidden) utility partition to grub so that you can select to boot it. If you do that, does it work? That, or Dell is expecting the MBR to be "their's", in which case, you need to have installed GRUB to the boot partition instead of the to the MBR so that the MBR would remain under BIOS control.
*** Bug 109312 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 109318 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I added the Partition to GRUB and it works fine now. You can get in via the bios by then selecting the partition in the boot manager (added step) or directly from the bootmanager itself without going through the bios.
There's no real way to detect this unfortunately -- but it basically means my guess is correct.