I have openSuse 11.3, yeah I know it’s old, but I found this old computer when I was moving. It’s a dual boot with Suse and Windows. It’s using GRUB for the boot loader. I am able to boot into the SUSE home partition fine. The problem comes when I try to log into Windows. I get a Windows stop error INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. There are ways to fix this within Windows but it rewrites your master boot record (MBR). My fear is then I’d lose my SUSE option when I boot up because then it’s using the Windows boot loader. Are there ways of doing this within Linux?
I notice that in menu.lst the Windows is booting at hd (0,0) and SUSE is booting at hd (0,7). Yes there are 8 partitions.
Perhaps nothing is actually corrupted on the Windows side, maybe it’s configuration within the menu.lst because I’m not sure if hd (0,0) is pointing to the Windows system partition, which is really the Windows boot partition.
Any other information you want, let me know.
That’s old, and using the older legacy grub.
As best I remember, hd(0,0) means “/dev/sda1” and hd(0,7) means “/dev/sda8”.
You have not indicated which Windows version. Windows 7 and Windows Vista could get confused if the active partition was not the Windows partition.
What’s the output from:
fdisk -l
Use CODE tags for that output.
I was able to fix it. I changed the BIOS setting for SATA to be disabled and it recognized the Windows installations (Windows 2000, etc). I also went into the System Partition on Windows through root on SUSE and edited the boot.ini so that the Windows 2000, not XP was the choice for the Windows bootup. I’m glad I didn’t do anything radical.
This was definitely a trip down memory lane.
BTW, what does SUSE use now for boot loading?
Another, how do I get rid of these random questions? Quite a nuisance.
These days, openSUSE is using “grub2” for booting. I think that started with openSUSE 12.2. And it has UEFI support in case that is needed.