For my son I bought a HP Pavilion dv6-2020sb.
Unfortunately for school he needs Windows (the teachers don’t allow he
works with openoffice).
I did numerous dual boot installations with XP and Vista before so I
thought a dual boot with Windows 7 would be a piece of cake.
It isn’t
The problem seems to be the dynamical drive of the laptop.
My first try last week was disastrous. I ended up with a laptop not able
to boot anymore. Whatever I did I got a “bootmgr not found” message.
Thanks to a friend I could restore the basic Windows 7 setup.
What I did was this:
First I skrink the 500 GB drive to the strict minimun using the Windows 7
disk tool. Then I create one big volume (exfat) for root and one 1 GB
volumes for swab (vfat) again with the Windows 7 disk tools. Then I
started the OpenSuse 11.2 istallation dvd
It all started with Yast unable to read the partition table of /dev/sda
<URL:http://users.telenet.be/tos4ever/downloads/yast.jpg> Dutch language
In short Parted used by Yast couldn’t read the partition table of
the /dev/sda disk.
As suggested I tried to create a mount point for root and for swab. But
whatever I tried I got an error. Saying something about no swab was
created. As I was in a hurry (my wife wanted to go out) I click on ok and
went further with the installation.
When I came back at home some hours later it turned out Grub wasn’t able
to write to MBR and there was also a Grub 17 error.
Reboot resulted into a “bootmgr not found” error.
Is there a way to run a dual boot Windows 7 + OpenSuse without the need to
convert the dynamic drive into a basic one?
The HP came without a Windows 7 system dvd, only with a recovery partition
(I did make a recovery DVD set) but I’m afraid the recovery dvd set will
not work when I change the partitions.
After shrinking the Win7 to whatever size, leave the rest untouched. Don’t use those Windooze tools further. Just start installing openSUSE. It will try to use the remaining space and do a partitioning of that portion. You can intervene and edit it if you want, during the installation.
Op Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:16:02 +0000, schreef syampillai:
>
> After shrinking the Win7 to whatever size, leave the rest untouched.
> Don’t use those Windooze tools further. Just start installing openSUSE.
> It will try to use the remaining space and do a partitioning of that
> portion. You can intervene and edit it if you want, during the
> installation.
I tried that yesterday and ended up in a dead system even before I could
do the installation. Windows didn’t start anymore.
Luckely for me the recovery dvd’s did work and to my great surprise the
disk was now formatted as a basic volume and not as a dynamic volume.
However shrinking the disk with win7 was no option as it converted the
disk into dynamic volumes if I tried to do so. Then I deleted the recovery
partition using the recovery dvd. After this I booted the Suse
installation dvd and eureka the shrinking, etc. all worked.
hi,
I too experienced some ‘issues’ with kde for windows, sorry, win7 upgrade.
4 months ago I used the vista tool to resize the hdd. This ended with (I only use primary partition) :
part1 : vista
part2 : alienware respaw
part3 : suse
part4 : swap
Had no problems for months, neither upgrading to opensuse 11.2.
than I did the stupid thing : upgrade to win7, thinking this will solve some problems (it did not :X).
I thought I only have to re-install grub but I ended with both system down >:(
After 4 hours I finally go through the problems : win7 changed the dynamic partition number ! : now I have :
part1 : vista/win7
part2 : suse
part3 : swap
part4 : respaw
With a rescue dvd, I just edit my /etc/fstab, /boot/grub/menu.lst according to the right id, re-install grub, now everything fine.
btw, for grub partition start at 0, for fstab at 1
if after re-install grub, you get some error right after grub, you’re probably trying to boot on the wrong partition (for me, trying to boot the swap lol!lol! ), check partitions (with fdisk for example) and re-edit menu.lst
in any way NEVER USE THE AUTOMATIC RESCUE TOOL this will override both grub config and fstab. I had backup, thanks, but if you have not, you’re good for a full re-install.
