Blank screen after installation...

English Install/Boot/Login
1

First of all, Greetings! Not quite a pleasant way entering to the community with a problem but what he hell…

So to begin with I was planning to make a dual boot machine(ThinkPad SL300) with Vista and SUSE and use Vista bootloader with a help of EasyBCD. (Vista installed as oem)

Now what I did: I installed openSUSE 11.1 (DVD) to the unallocated space that was on the extended partition, all went fine. I chose to install Grub to /boot partition (maybe I should have been chosen root partition instead, I really do not know the difference…), anyway grub went to sda7. MBR was not overwritten. At least my Lenovo Care button (the blue one) works pretty good.

Unfortunately after restart my computer do not boot at all, I have a black screen with a flashing dash.

Some additional information:

sda1 - primary boot partition
sda2 - Vista installation
sda6 - swap
sda7 - root
sda8 - home

Grub finds itself on (hd0,6) so I think its the same as sda7.

My first thought was to restore windows boot sector, but the Lenovo Rescue & Recovery is bloody pointless, it only allows me to restore full system.
So what are my options? And I can not understand how the installation affected Vista’s booting? Did I do something wrong?

Thank you. Any help would be appreciated.

2

I’m glad to say that I found out what was causing the problem. For some reason during the installation process my extended partition was signed as bootable instead of my primary boot partition. So I set that back and I’m again able to boot windoza.

I thank the author for this HowTo, it helped to figure it out. Although cfdisk did not work, I had to use fdisk for toggling bootable flags. So far so good, I’ll definitely report back if I encounter more problems. :wink:

But I have still a question why did it changed the flag automatically during the installation? Did I missed something, do I have an option for changing it when installing?

3

It could change the flags if you set it to boot from the boot partition. Or if the root partition is way up the cylinders of the drive (as it appears here it maybe is way up there). Something like that – I’m a bit hazy about that because I’ve never looked after the event to see what the conditions are that change the flags.

Thanks for the heads up re cfdisk – I’ve changed the text to make iut clear to do it as root user

sudo /sbin/cfdisk /dev/sdx