Ok, so I installed openSUSE recently alongside Windows Vista. Vista is on a C partition. D and E are partition I created on windows before installing openSUSE. D and E are both empty. This morning I decided to merge D and E into one. I didn’t realise this would affect anything, as I’ve done this before with no problems. But now when I start up the computer it won’t even getto the grub screen where I can choose to boot either Windows or openSUSE. Instead, I get this:
Can anyonle please help me so I can at least choose to boot Windows so I can fix this? I don’t mind if I have to reinstall Linux, but I need windows. Any help here is appreciated. Please note I’m a noob at this, so you might have to explain a lot.
Since error 15 means “file not found” I think the reason is that you have one partition less after merging the D: and E: partition. So grub doesn’t find the files any more. Could you please boot the system with a Linux (!) live CD? Please type on a console after doing so:
fdisk -l
Also mount the partition where /boot is and go to /mountpoint/boot/grub and type
I have sucessfuly run the live CD. I went to the terminal and typed in fdisk -1 and got the following:
Absolute path to 'fdisk' is '/sbin/fdisk', so running it may require superuser privileges (eg /root)
What does this mean and how do I go from here? I’m not sure how to do what you mentioned in the rest of your post. I am a n00b at Linux so could you please walk me through step-by-step? Thanks.
User “root” is the name for the administrator and of course the administrator has superuser permissions.
The regular user on the liveCD is user “linux” and the password for the regular user is . The password for the root/administrator on the liveCD is also
Try this:
su -c 'fdisk -l'
and press <enter> if prompted for a password. That line means run the command ‘fdisk -l’ with administrator (root) permissions.
fdisk: invalid option -- '1'
Usage: fdisk -b SSZ] -u] DISK Change partition table
fdisk -1 -b SSZ] -u] DISK List partition table(s)
fdisk -s PARTITION Give partition size(s) in blocks
fdisk -v Give fdisk version
Here DISK is something like /dev/hdb or dev/sda
and PARTITION is something like /dev/hda7
-u: give Start and End in sector (instead of cylinder) units
-b 2048: (for certain MO disks) use 2048-byte sectors
linux@linux:-> su -c 'fdisk -1'
Your situation would be easy enough for us to solve if we had you computer in our sweaty little mitts - But we don’t - So we have to explain this and that, and correct you here and there, and spell it out ABC…
fdisk -l
will produce something that looks like this:
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 20673 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x93900d8b
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 9017 68163763+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 * 9017 20674 88124527 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 9017 9437 3172806 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 9437 12212 20980858+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 12212 17065 36692428+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 17065 20674 27278338+ 83 Linux
You have three hds. The third one is an old small one which isn’t of interest at the moment. It’s just there.
The first one contains the system partition of windows (c: ).
The second hd contains the windows partition d: which was d: and e: before. The partition /dev/sdb6 or /dev/sdb7 must be the root partition of Linux. So do the following please. Type after booting the live CD:
su<Enter>
<Enter at password prompt>
mount /dev/sdb6 /mnt<enter>
cd /mnt/boot/grub<enter>
cat menu.lst<enter>
If you get after the cd command “File or directory not found” type
umount /dev/sdb6
mount /dev/sdb7 /mnt
and go on with the cd and the cat command. Post the result here.
