lost windows boot option

[chris6874]

hi,
i had installed windows xp on my laptop and later on, i installed linux suse 11.1. both systems worked well and i had the option to select the system during boot.
No idea how, but i crashed my boot section (perhaps i switched of my computer during boot).
I was able to reinstalle the linux bootloader with the repair option from dvd, but now i have no idea, how i can get back windows...
can anybody help me, i try it now since three weeks...
thanks
chris from Austria


perhaps this helps:

christoph@linux-6wkr:/home> su
Passwort:
linux-6wkr:/home # fdisk -l

Platte /dev/sda: 160.0 GByte, 160041885696 Byte
255 Köpfe, 63 Sektoren/Spuren, 19457 Zylinder
Einheiten = Zylinder von 16065 × 512 = 8225280 Bytes
Disk identifier: 0xbf2354c3

Gerät boot. Anfang Ende Blöcke Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1034 8305573+ 12 Compaq Diagnostics
/dev/sda2 1035 6900 47118645 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 * 10762 19457 69850620 f W95 Erw. (LBA)
/dev/sda4 6901 10761 31013482+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 10762 16450 45688860 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 16450 16711 2104452 82 Linux Swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 16712 19322 20972826 83 Linux

Partitionstabelleneinträge sind nicht in Platten-Reihenfolge
linux-6wkr:/home #

[Knurpht]

Three weeks is far too long.

Your Windows is still there as you might have guessed, The thing to do is to start Yast - System - Bootloader, to recreate the bootloader's configuration. Normally this should bring things back in a working state,

If not, please also post contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst

[swerdna]

Here's a quote from this tutorial to amplify Knurpht's advice:

go to Yast --> System --> Boot Loader. The Grub configuration screen comes up with the Tab "Section Management" activated. In the lower right is a drop-down selector labelled "Other". Select from "Other" the option "Propose New Configuration" and then wait for Grub to analyse your partitions and display a new configuration. This may take a while. Important: When that finishes, activate the tab labelled "Boot Loader Installation" and select to "Boot from the Master Boot Record". [Yast will often default to booting from the root or boot partition rather than from the MBR but that's for experts only -- always choose the MBR.] Then click Finish to save the changes and install the reconfigured Grub into the hard drive's MBR. If you get a message that "The bootloader boot sector will be written to a floppy disk ......... don't bother with the floppy -- just click OK to proceed and install to the MBR. Reboot and you should be able to boot to openSUSE and windows using the Grub menu screen.

That usually works OK with xp