Booting openSUSE 11 and SuSE 9.3 - known issues?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,

are there any known issues with using GRUB installed on
a MBR to boot either SuSE 9.3 or openSuSE 11?

I’m asking because my first installation attempt
went wrong and deleted the boot loader for 9.3 as well.
GRUB gave me an error 15.

I spent several hours repairing the 9.3 system and
re-installing openSUSE 11, using different drives for
the MBR, but whenever I tried to add the other
installation to the boot loader, things went wrong.

Any hints appreciated.

Thanks, Stephan

2

Can you boot in to the working system (not sure if that’s 9.3 or 11.00)

In a terminal as su, type

fdisk -l

paste result here
identify what is what

also give us
/etc/fstab
and
/boot/grub/menu.lst

3

>fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 20.4 GB, 20490559488 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2491 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 2490 20000893+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/hdb: 20.4 GB, 20490559488 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2491 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 262 2104483+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hdb2 * 263 1300 8337735 83 Linux
/dev/hdb3 1301 2001 5630782+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdb4 2002 2491 3935925 f W95 Ext’d (LBA)
/dev/hdb5 2002 2491 3935893+ 6 FAT16

Disk /dev/hdd: 300.0 GB, 300069052416 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 36481 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdd1 1 6528 52436128+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdd2 6529 19582 104856255 83 Linux
/dev/hdd3 19583 32636 104856255 83 Linux
/dev/hdd4 32637 36479 30868897+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

hda: MBR, 1 partition with Windows NTFS
hdb2: SuSE 9.3, currently working
hdd1: Partition on which I installed openSUSE 11. It worked,
but when I tried to add SuSE 9.3 to the bootloader, it vanished.
hdd4: I used it as swap for openSUSE 11 because I didn’t want
to use hdb at all.

SuSE 9.3>more /etc/fstab
/dev/hdb2 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hdb3 /home reiserfs defaults 1 2
/dev/hdb1 swap swap pri=42 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs noauto,fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid
,sync 0 0

/dev/hda1 /windows/C ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=00
02,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hdb5 /windows/D vfat users,gid=users,umask=0002,
utf8=true 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/dvdram subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,
nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/hdd1 /data1 auto noauto,user 0 0
/dev/hdd2 /data1 auto noauto,user 0 0
/dev/hdd3 /data1 auto noauto,user 0 0

SuSE93> more /boot/grub/menu.lst

Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Sat Oct 4 13:31:11 EDT 2008

color white/blue black/light-gray
default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd1,1)/boot/message

###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title SUSE LINUX 9.3
kernel (hd1,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb2 vga=0x31a selinux=0 splash=silen
t resume=/dev/hdd4 showopts
initrd (hd1,1)/boot/initrd

###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows###
title Windows
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: floppy###
title Floppy
root (fd0)
chainloader +1

###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe – SUSE LINUX 9.3
kernel (hd1,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb2 showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=o
ff vga=normal noresume selinux=0 barrier=off nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 3
initrd (hd1,1)/boot/initrd

I’m willing to give this another try if there are no
known issues.
Now that I know how to repair the boot loader (or GRUB?),
it will at most take me 2 hours.

Thanks for your help! Stephan

4

I should probably add that I had openSUSE 10.1 on hdd1. That worked fine, I could boot 9.3 or 10.1. Things went wrong when I tried to replace 10.1 with 11.

Thanks, Stephan

5

I am not aware of any issues.

Ok. Correct me if I’m wrong. But you are using 9.3 to boot currently?

Your fdisk -l tells us everything is there.

You should be able to use the Yast bootloader to add suse11 to your boot. Or you could edit the menu.lst manually.
What may help you is actually getting the contents of the suse 11 menu.lst (if the disk is mounted in 9.3 you should be able to read it from root) or use a live cd/dvd like knoppix which can give usually give you access to all partitions.
Even using the suse dvd is an option to repair the bootloader. Though I cannot stress enough - the need to be meticulous in doing it. You must know where you want grub installing (the MBR of which drive) - and you must of course have your hard drives set in bios to boot accordingly.

6

Bear in mind that 11.0 uses 256 byte inodes for ext3 filesystems by default and older GRUBs may not be able to deal with this. So if you dual boot, it should be with the newer GRUB, installed by 11.0.

7

Yeah. Agreed!
I missed that. So using suse 11 grub is the way to go.Well spotted ken_yap
Use the suse 11 dvd

8

Hi,

it’s been a while.
I didn’t find the time to try again until yesterday. I used SuSE 11.1 instead of 11.
Everything went fine except that when I try to boot 9.3 from the new GRUB menu now,
it displays the file system (0x83, Reiser) and then a “invalid file format” error. After a short time, it displays another boot menu, with 9.3 and Windows, but no 11.1.
I think it’s the menu from the MBR of the second hard drive, which I used a long time ago. I can boot SuSE 9.3 from this second menu without any issues.
Any idea what causes this “invalid file format” error?
Is the ReiseFS ‘expected’ by 11.1 different from the one
created by 9.3?

Thanks, Stephan