Well, here is the rest of today's story.
After creating a partition where I was going to install Linux (Fedora 6), and moving my Windows 2000 partition a little bit to the right (so that there would be some space for GRUB loader, at the beginning of the disk), I successfully installed Fedora 6. The installation also put GRUB into /dev/hde3 (partition to the left from NTFS). So, my layout was the following:
/dev/hde3 - grub loader (~100BM)
/dev/hde1 - Windows 2000 (~16.6GB)
/dev/hde2 - Linux Fedora 6. (~20GB)
All went fine, and I was able to run both Windows and Linux depending on my choice at startup.
Here the bad part starts.
I booted using GParted live CD again, to look at the new layout. There was something I was going to ask (right on this forum) - the largest partition was listed twice. So, I tried to make a snapshot of the screen. GParted creates gparted.jpeg on /root. Now I need to copy it on a floppy or somewhere else. It did not let me mount a floppy.
I ended up mounting /dev/hde3 device with thes commands:
mkdir /tmp/data
mount -t /ext3 /tmp/data /dev/hde3
(success)
cp gparted.jpeg /dev/hde3
(success)
I verified that gparted.jpeg actually was placed to /dev/hde3.
And rebooted (without umount).
When I chose (in GRUB) to load Fedora 6, its starts loading and
says:
*****************************************
No volume groups found
Volume Group "VolGroup00" not found
Unable to access resume device (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01)
..
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
*****************************************
That's it. The only option is to press reset button.
I still can successfully load Windows.
Trying to solve this, I rebooted PC again using GParted. Now its start was flaky, and in the end it does not show any partitions that it created. It only shows one unused partition of 40GB (even though I still can run Windows on this PC). I still could mount /dev/hde3 and see gaparted.jpeg file (later I removed this file, but it did not change anything).
Then I decided to re-install Fedora 6, hoping to use a mode when I can erase all Linux partitions and install Fedora 6 there. What I get though even before I get to this screen is:
"Invalid partition table on /dev/hde -- wrong signature 4948".
I am afraid that if I continue the install, it would simply wipe out my Windows partition.
What should I do? Run Fedora rescue disk? Why this problem happened? All I did I copied a file to a partition. Is this possible that the problem occured simply because I did not call umount on /tmp/data? But I rebooted the PC, and this should not matter, after all.
Any ideas?