Hello, I am trying to run a dual boot of vista and opensuse 11.0. I installed opensuse fine no problems, and I was able to get a choice of whether to log into opensuse or vista. Suse loaded fine but when I tried to go into vista I got an error saying a boot loader file was missing. I put the vista installation dvd in, and fixed it by going into the command prompt. After I rebooted, the grub loader didn’t show up, and I was taken right into vista. How do I get the grub loader choice for suse or vista back?
adaykin,
Have a look at this article,
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tip/18010.html
Best way to about this, dual boot business is to install Vista first and
then Linux. And Linux will take care of this automatically.
–
Niclas Ekstedt, CNA/CNE/CNS/CLS
Systems Engineer/NSC Sysop
Telindus Sweden AB
I did install vista first, and I am still at where I am…
I think you have to write grub back to the MBR to get things working the way you want. With the default setting gurb will place/install itself on your boot partition. With fixing the Vista boot, vista has placed it’s bootloader back in the MBR.
Have a closer look at step 9 in the article suggested by Niclas;
Now we are ready for the final step - installing grub. Run the following command:
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/hda
I don’t dualboot with Vista (chucked it from my system), but the trick is in correct chain loading in grub.
Yeah I had already tried the article, but when I was finished, it just wiped out the vista option at boot loader (on top of that compiz screwed up suse already). When I tried manually entering vista in as a partition in the suse boot manager file, I got an error message when I tried to boot into vista. Is there any way I can fix this problem by going into vista’s boot manager in windows? After that I may need to repair my system to get compiz out of there as well.
I don’t have the details for you on dual booting with Vista as I have gotten lazy and reverted to using a boot manager. To much hassle when you get to set up different systems on the same machine as much I a tend to (not meant to brag! Just focusing on how lazy I like to be 
)
I know there are members here that have the experience to lead you through this, but it might be better to open a new thread with a direct title, like ‘need help in dual booting with Vista’
There could be some good threads in the archives, but I can’t judge them to be able to point them out to you.
Would be good if you get it fixed and let ‘us’ know!
Cheers,
Wj