First 64b Installation

Firstly, pardon my rant, but it’s been a weekend of wrestling with my computer, and I think it deserves a paragraph or two.

My home PC is primarily an XP machine (I have a wife) and Linux has always had a secondary spot on every machine which has ever operated under my roof. And since version 7, I have been a loyal disciple of SuSE, and SuSE only. I’m not a strong command-line user, but I manage to get around the desktop fairly well.

Since my recent assembly of my first 64 bit machine, I am installing my first 64 bit SuSE, 10.3. Read so many great reviews, I was very excited to devote a weekend to a new installation, and a sixpack or 3. My primary HD is a pair of SATA drives in a RAID 0 config (XP), a 3rd SATA for backup, and 1 IDE HD, which was to become the home for a dedicated installation of SuSE. All went very well at the configuration and installation stages, until the very end of installation at the boot installation, where I would consistently get the error “error parsing number”, regardless of what partition I indicate, in both GRUB and LILO. My goal is to install the boot sector on its install HD rather than the XP MBR (I’ve learned how much fun that can lead to). To boot to Linux, I would just soft-switch the boot order from system startup. No luck, even supergrub wouldn’t help me. Figured it was something to do with my raid disk, so I physically disconnected them as a test. No luck – it wouldn’t find my IDE drive, just my SATA 3 disk. Disconnected that one too.

So finally after many refreshing cold-ones, I had a successful install. Everything went great – installed about 1400 packages (relatively quick in my opinion), very fast reboots during configuration, all updates/patches/ and whatnot, real smooth. Great boot-up time, much faster than any past version (assuming/hoping that’s due to the 64-bit version) and like all past installations, couldn’t have been happier with SuSE. Until I reconnected my other drives. All I get is the blank screen with blinking cursor. Haven’t yet run ubergrub, maybe that will fix things, but I feel that after bootup with the other drives installed, HD(0,1) is probably no longer my suse boot partition, rather one of my raid drives. How can I install a totally stand-alone (and crash alone should that ever become the case) drive which I can point to at startup (F8) rather than have to physically change the boot order in my BIOS everytime I want to run linux? I would really appreciate suggestions. Danka, JM_Brazil.

Just for the record, I finally fixed this problem with SuperGrub. Great program, good to have on hand.