Hi all,
I have a question regarding the bootloader GRUB. First of all, i’m a newbie to linux so i hope to find some help here.
It probably is nice to know that everything is working fine and i have no problems whatsoever. However, i want (need) to change my bootloader (GRUB). This is how the story goes.
I’m selling one of my computers which has a windows installation on it. Mainly, my wife was using it and is not very happy about me selling the computer. So i cleaned the computer and such. Now it is ready for sale but my wife doesn’t like linux which is installed on my computer. So i decided to make a dualboot so my wife could continue using windows and me SuSE. Everything perfect and all but my wife is not very comprehensive towards computers. So i’d like to know how to configure GRUB to start windows instead of SuSE. Also, i got 2 windows entries. Windows 1 (XP Professional) and windows 2 (unknown, if i start this entry my screen goes blank and after a while it reboots).
So my question is, how do i configure the bootsettings and can i safely remove the windows 2 entry?
Kind regards,
Drcomputer80
Just change the default kernel that it starts by using YaST > … > Bootloader. Then all your wife has to do is wait or hit the return key if impatient. You will have to use the cursor key to select Linux within a few seconds.
As for the bogus Windows entry, that may be the recovery partition or something like that if you had such a thing, but can’t really say why it doesn’t work. Or it really is bogus and got added by accident. Maybe if you post the contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst we might have a better suggestion.
Wow, that was fast! Thank you for your reply. However, i was to quick posting my topic here.
I found my way to the bootloader using YaST. I edited my settings there.
@ken_yap:
About the bogus windows, i do not know. I wasn’t able to read the menu.lst file using Kwrite and i edited my settings before i read your reply. It might looked something like this:
title windows 2
(hd2, hd0)
(hd0, hd2)
Or the other way around.
title windows 2
(hd0, hd2)
(hd2, hd0)
Anyway, it is solved now. Thank you a lot for the answers. My wife will be happy again, hehe.
Cruising by and leaving some passing comments FYI:
When you install openSUSE, Yast’s Grub module creates an entry in Grub’s menu.lst for every fat and ntfs partition on the drives. It doesn’t understand which partitions contains windows bootloader files, so it just makes an entry for all and leaves the rest to you. The extra entry can never be used to boot an operating system because it points to a partition that has no bootloader files on board to continue the booting process. You can without fear highlight that entry in Yast’s bootloader module and select to delete it.
Regarding this: “I wasn’t able to read the menu.lst file using Kwrite”. That’s because the devs have arranged for the permissions on menu.lst to be -rw------- which is readable only by the owner which is root. So you can’t access it unless you become root-like. These two will read it:
- kdesu kwrite /boot/grub/menu.lst
- sudo cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
Just thought you might like to know the why of that 