Install of Suse 11 renders other partition unbootable

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Greetings All,

I have a laptop with a fairly large (256gb) disk partitioned to support multiple OSs. Having SUSE 10.3 working quite well, I decided to install SUSE 11 on a separate partition. The installation went well.

However, after the install, I could no longer boot the SUSE 10.3 partition. For some reason, the boot record for this partition was destroyed. In addition, I could not install GRUB using the SUSE 11 image. Attempts to do so resulted in a Floating Point Exception from GRUB.

I was able to repair the damaged partition by removal of the
SUSE 11 partition, and running GRUB from a bootable Linux (RIP).

Both SUSE levels were installed on an EXT2 partition. Both partitions were primary partitions. Both partitions were the same size (20gb). The GRUB level for SUSE and RIP appears to be the same.

Are there differences in EXT2 formats between SUSE 10.3 and SUSE 11? Any ideas on what the problem might be are greatly appreciated.

Thanx in advance

Rich

2

I don’t know if it exactly relates, but apparently SuSE11.0 went with 256byte inodes - getting ready for ext4 I was told - and apparently this borks all earlier GRUB installs, since earlier versions of GRUB expect smaller inodes. Can anyone else verify?
Patti

3

For me Suse 11 (x86_64) installed happily on disk beside existing 10.3 partitions (ext3). Didn’t break anything.