hi all, i had a multi boot (Windowx XP & openSUSE 11.0)
first: i had windows xp then i wanted to try openSUSE, so i downloaded the cd and installed it and everything were working pretty well so far…
then,
i had problems with XP so i had to reinstall it, and it reformated C partition which was Only for Windows, i didn’t do any thing to openSUSE partition…
when the Installation is done i found my PC only boots to Windows directly without showing me the Green screen boot to choose between openSUSE and Windows… :’(
now i want to get back to my openSUSE cuz i have been trying to get used to it, i had most of my bookmarks there, alot of Documents and pictures…
obviously the windows can’t see the Ext3 partitions of the openSUSE so i can’t get my files from there…
is there a way to modify the boot again to choose between openSUSE and Windows…
cuz i dont wanna re-install openSUSE again and lose all my bookmars and files…
Bear in mind that windows wants to install on the entire hard drive and see’s it all as ‘c.’ Thus XP may have formatted and installed on the entire drive - yes bummer. If after following the above you still don’t see opensuse you may have to reinstall it.
You may also want to consider this from the wiki article written by one of the openSUSE dev’s:
We recommend to keep the MBR “neutral”, that is, not consider it part of any operating system. For that purpose, a generic MBR can be used, that simply determines one of the 4 primary partitions by a bit flag, and then loads the first block of that partition in turn, to continue the boot process. The Yast installation offers the option to install such generic code in the MBR; do it when in doubt . . . laptops have been found to abuse the MBR for recovery. They work well when you assume the generic behaviour, but things break when the MBR gets overwritten. Use a generic MBR wherever you can.
With the various unpredictable (especially in laptops) uses which manufacturers and Microsoft are using the MBR for, this advice is taking on more and more value. If the openSUSE root resides on a “primary” partition, you can use the DVD Repair to install “generic boot code” to the MBR, install grub to the openSUSE partition’s boot sector rather than to the MBR, and instruct YaST to mark that partition “active”. This is the method referred to above. (If openSUSE’s root is on a logical partition, grub can be installed to the “extended primary” boot sector instead - this method does not work if grub is in a logical partition boot sector.) Should there ever been a problem booting openSUSE, it is trivial to switch the “active” flag back to the Windows partition, which will boot from the generic MBR code (which is, in fact, DOS code).
there is something weird in this steps cuz thus guide says…
“Step 1 for openSUSE 11.0 - Assisted Boot into openSUSE: Insert Suse’s installation CD/DVD and reboot the computer. On the boot screen choose to “Repair Installed System”. Wait for three choices and select “Expert Tools”.”
when i boot from the CD i only find this options:-:
OpenSUSE-11.0
FailSafe-OpenSUSE-11.0
Hard-Dick
Memory Test
Mediacheck
and on the bottom right there is F1 for help and F2 for Languages and F3 for VGA options i guess,
where to find that option he have mention in the article
“Repair Installed System”
follow these steps carefully.
if anything wrong shutdown.
boot with cd and open terminal
do you remember partition number of suse installation?
#mkdir /mnt/suse #mount /dev/sdx /mnt/suse…[change x with partition number]
if no error #chroot /mnt/suse /bin/bash
if no error #grub-install /dev/sda
you can correct if xp does not start again from within suse
follow this only if you understand all steps.
Please pardon me, but the above is not correct nor is it necessary.
First, it is not correct in that the “grub-install” script does not work the same way in openSUSE as it does in other distros - all it will do is call the grub shell and feed it the install command string which is in /etc/grub.conf - that file is created by YaST Boot Loader. The grub-install file documents this; the vanilla grub package grub-install in openSUSE is named grub-install.unsupported.
Second, it is not necessary to mount the openSUSE partition to install grub (and the mount syntax above is incomplete). The grub manual suggests always using the shell if possible. Before giving you the instructions for doing this from the LiveCD (or using YaST for the alternative method I described earlier), it would be wise to first check the partition layout and how grub was previously installed (it may not even be necessary to reinstall it). So boot from the LiveCD, open a terminal window and do:
su
fdisk -lu
This will list the partitions, post the output back here. Also, if you know which of those partitions is the openSUSE root, then you can do this (while still in the terminal; if you closed it down, use the “su” command again before the following):
mount -t ext3 /dev/sd<x><y> /mnt
cat /mnt/etc/grub.conf
Where <x> is the drive letter and <y> is the partition number (for example, sda3). Then post back the output of the last command (the “cat”). If you aren’t sure about which is the right partition, just post back the fdisk partition list and we can take it from there.
It is entirely possible that the setup I described in my previous post is already on your computer - I just helped another user who asked for the same instructions as you did and we found his computer was already set up that way. So do the above so we can be sure what is right for you.
You have changed the partitioning since you first installed openSUSE. Originally, the openSUSE root was sda9, or in grub numbering (which starts with 0) that is (hd0,8). Grub was installed to the MBR (hd0), pointing to sda9 (see the /etc/grub.conf file).
To reinstall grub as it was originally, boot from the LiveCD, get into the terminal, switch to root, and do:
grub
root (hd0,4)
setup (hd0) (hd0,4)
quit
After the root command grub should return a message indicating it found the partition and that it is formatted ext2/3. The setup command should return ~7 lines; those lines should indicate that grub stage1 was found, that grub stage2 was found, and that grub was installed successfully. If so, reboot and you should be back to where you were before reinstalling Windows.
