Dual boot: openSUSE ignoring Win7

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I’ve been dual-booting Win7RC and openSUSE on this laptop since the RC was released last year. Win7 is on the first partition. I updated the openSUSE to 11.2 when it was first released.

About a week ago, openSUSE began balking at loading. The progress bar would get to about the 95% point and hang so I booted off the installation media and ran a self-repair. It found and corrected some file system inconsistencies (which I suspect Win7 had caused). That fixed the Linux install but the boot menu is no longer offering Windows as an option (probably in retaliation for Windoze messing with its file system). I’ve booted off Hiren’s boot CD and checked the Windoze file system and it ‘looks’ normal (for all I know about Win7).

I tried repairing Win7 off the install DVD but that didn’t help. It recognizes the existing install and makes all the noises like it was successful but there’s still no Windoze in the boot menu. If this were Eks Pee I’d have done an ‘update’ install but the update install on the Win7RC DVD can will only run if invoked from a live operating system.

I presume that the Win7 installation is still healthy but that the openSUSE self-repair deleted it from the boot options menu.

Anybody know what I can look at to determine if I’m right and – hopefully – fix my dual boot? There is no irreplaceable data on either of these OSs but I want to fix the problem for the educational value and because if it happened once, it’ll surely happen again. Every past effort I ever made to live with a dual-booted system ended with a turf war of just this sort.

2

Here is how it is set up in my /boot/grub/menu.lst

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

You may have to change the (hd0,0) to (hd0,1) or something, depending on your setup.

3

As a side note, I like to keep a copy of certain files backed up for reference at a later date.

Such as:
/boot/grub/menu.lst
/etc/fstab
/etc/crontab
/etc/group
/etc/hosts

Speaking of backups, if you look in /boot/grub, you may find a menu.lst~ or a menu.lst.old that you can copy and past from.

4

Meh, …never mind. I’ve toasted the Windoze installation so now there’s no point in not starting from scratch. No great loss; there were configuration choices in the openSUSE install I’d come to regret anyway.

Thanks for the help, Wilson_Phillips.

5

Here is my two cents:
I have installed Win7 and 11.2 on a couple desktops. I have an 80gig drive and the partitions are as below (output from “gdisk.exe”. On another system, I have a oneTB drive and for some reason grub does not install correctly, so on that system I am using easyBCD to modify the Windows7 boot menu. I really doubt Windows would hurt the linux partitions and the linux install. Unless you are messing around with the Windows partition manager!

Partition Status Type Volume Label Mbytes System Usage
1 PRIMARY 29996.3 NTFS/HPFS 39%
2 A PRIMARY 2000.7 LINUX 3%
3 PRIMARY 4001.5 LINUX SWAP 5%
4 EXTENDED 40317.5 53%
5 LOGICAL 17999.3 LINUX 24%
C: 6 LOGICAL 22318.2 FAT32 29%