So, with openSUSE 11.4 living happily on one hard drive (sda), I went and installed Ubuntu Natty on my computer’s other drive (sdb.) I was under the impression that if I kept the installation contained entirely on the second drive, I could boot directly to it through bios, and not worry about bootloaders.
It seems that I was wrong.
When I try to boot to the hard drive w/ Ubuntu on it, nothing loads. The BIOS freezes at “Verifying DMI Pool…” I can still boot into my openSUSE install as normal, but its GRUB doesn’t see the Ubuntu installation on the other hard drive. I tried using Super Grub Disk to boot the Ubuntu disk, and it’s able to detect the Ubuntu OS, but goes into a kernel panic with the error message that VFS wasn’t able to mount. When I’ve got my opensuse installation going, I can see the files and folders from the Ubuntu installation, and everything looks more or less normal.
I figured I should ask for some help before I try anything that might screw up my working openSUSE installation. So any advice on how to get them up and running together?