Installed the above live gnome version on to sata hard drive with several partitions and several distros.
Formatted one partition for suse and chose to install grub to root partition. Everything went fine.
Rebooted to NO operating system found. In fact, my hard drive has disappeared from bios.
Reset bios to default. Reset chmos. Still no joy. Booted with another live cd and everything is on the drive and intact. Checked flags with gparted and the extended partition was set as boot. Reset first partition as boot and I am now able to boot into xp although bios still will not detect hard drive until it searches.
I suspect suse has somehow made my hard drive hidden or not bootable but I’m unable to find a cure.
I can try installing a boot loader to mbr but I’m not sure this will help my bios problem.
What could suse have done to cause this? I’ve been installing distros on this machine for years with nothing like this happening.
Thanks for replying. You are exactly right and why this happened is a mystery.
I went back into the suse installer via live cd and tried to reinstall grub to mbr. Although it failed, I suspect the drive was marked as active or bootable again.
It turned out that suse wiped my previous mbr as well as installing grub to partition as it was asked. This could have been the problem although the drive still should have showed in bios.
I even have the suse install intact and am quite impressed that ralink wireless works with encryption out-of-box. This is a first for me. Normally, I need ndiswrapper and windows drivers.