I have no idea why this is being so difficult, but it is. I am installing into a Sony VAIO laptop SRX77 and have tried several different approaches; none have worked.
Here’s what I’ve tried:
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Started with working XP as first partition. Installed SUSE 11 (SLED) accepting all partition recommendations. After installation, machine does not boot: Missing operating system. Examined drive in another machine and found Linux installed itself in three partitions (swap, / and /home), but created those partitions as logical and not primary partitions, and had set no partition active. Was unable to set linux / partition as active, but setting XP partition active restored XP booting.
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Started with XP again. With drive in another machine, created three primary partitions for linux and reinstalled. Similar result, but this time the linux partitions stayed as primary, and / partition was set active. Again, when XP partition is set active, XP boot is restored.
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Started with Linux on clean drive, and got OS installed and running properly. Then created another primary partition at the end of the last Linux partition and moved a working XP installation to that partition. Tried adding that partition to grub with no luck.
Not sure which way to go from here. I’m not particular about whether I use the Windows bootloader and add linux to it, or whether it boots with Grub and I add XP to that.
I can give more details if they help anyone help me with this.
Thanks very much for any leads you experienced dual booters can give me.
Peter.
XP requires that the bootloader files reside in the first primary partition so you might as well install it there in this case.
Then delete all the other partitions and install SLED. It’s no big deal if a partition is primary or logical, except for windows which must have its bootloader files on the first primary partition.
That’s like a repeat of attempt #1. When you are in the Installation programme, check that Grub is set to boot from the Master Boot Record – that sounds like the problem you had in attempt #1.
Thank you. I was having two problems:
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GRUB was loading from the /boot partition instead of the MBR and this was working fine during my test installations of just Linux last week. But somewhere along the line (and the line was very long with all sorts of opportunities for an MBR to get messed up), something seems to have happened to obstruct that. Taking your suggestion to move it to the MBR took care of Linux not booting.
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I was and still am confused about partition order, how that order is designated and where that info is kept. For instance, I thought that if the XP partition was first on the drive, followed by swap, then / and then /home partitions, then the GRUB menu for the XP partition should point to partition “0” as in root (hd0,0) and the XP BOOT.INI file should point to partition 1. That’s not so however. Linux sees that partition as partition 3 and Windows sees it as partition 4 even though it’s first on the drive.
I now have both Linux and XP booting from the GRUB menu, but still have the question about the partition order.
I created my partitions in a somewhat unorthoxox way: I used fdisk to place a Linux partition at the END of the hard drive, and then installed telling YAST not to use the unallocated space left at the beginning. After Linux was running, I moved the drive to a windows machine, created an NTFS partition at the start of the drive and then restored the backed-up XP partition to the drive.
So, I conclude that the partition number is recorded in the drive’s partition table, and the number is a function not of the partition’s location on the drive, but of the order in which it was created. Have I got all that right?
Thanks for your help!
Peter.
Oh yes, one more question.
If I wanted to go back to having GRUB loading from the / partition instead of the MBR, how would I do that. In particular, what might have caused GRUB to stop functioning when installed there, and how would I troubleshoot how to fix it?
Thanks again.
Peter.
I created my partitions in a somewhat unorthoxox way: I used fdisk to place a Linux partition at the END of the hard drive, and then installed telling YAST not to use the unallocated space left at the beginning. After Linux was running, I moved the drive to a windows machine, created an NTFS partition at the start of the drive and then restored the backed-up XP partition to the drive.
So, I conclude that the partition number is recorded in the drive’s partition table, and the number is a function not of the partition’s location on the drive, but of the order in which it was created. Have I got all that right?
I’ve done a lot of things with partitions, but never that. I think that you’re probably right. Run this command and have a look at the cylinder lineup. Tell us what you see:
sudo /sbin/fdisk -l
If I wanted to go back to having GRUB loading from the / partition instead of the MBR, how would I do that. In particular, what might have caused GRUB to stop functioning when installed there, and how would I troubleshoot how to fix it?
GoTo Yast’s bootloader module and set it to boot from the root partition and unset the checkmark in MBR, see what happens. It’s easy enough to fix if it doesn’t work.
Regarding troubleshooting back into history – I can’t get my head around the original sequence of changes to help with that.