Hi,
as the harddisk at my Acer Travelmate 4002WLMi has been died I bought a new one that has enough space to store Windows and Linux.
I have now installed Windows XP Pro SP3. I did this before too and then tried to installed openSuse 11 by using th installer that appears when the DVD is put into the drive under windows. The result was that I could install openSuse 11 but when it restarts the box it does not find any operating system. So I tried the to fix the windows installation by fixmbr and such things but it does not help anything (the error message changes from German to English but that’s it). At the end I decided to reinstall windows again from zero.
Now windows is running fine. I have a 120GB HDD installed at the notebook. 70 GB are used by windows, the remaining space is not used or formatted and can be used from Suse.
What might be the problem in my first attempt to install suse on that machine. Should I try to use the non-ACPI-kernel?
If it doesn’t find any operating system, that suggests that there is a problem with the BIOS or the MBR.
The standard procedure for virtually all Linux dual boot systems is to overwrite the MBR with a pointer to GRUB which is on the Linux partition. GRUB then offers you a menu of operating systems - on my Acer that includes Acer’s own failsafe system as well as Windows and both openSUSE and openSUSE failsafe.
There was a story a few months ago about a BIOS, I think from AMI, which had a bug which prevented Linux being installed. It has now been withdrawn but machines produced over an 18 month period with this BIOS will not run Linux.
Try Googling the exact name of your BIOS and see if it produces any reports of problems with Linux.
If that isn’t the problem, how far are you getting? Do you get a message about GRUB Stage 1.5? If you don’t get there, the problem is with the MBR but I cannot guess what it is.
I cannot think that this would be a problem with the openSUSE installer but, if the Linux partition starts too far from the start of the hard disk, there can be problems reading the GRUB file.
Just some thoughts.
Another thought ot add to john_hudson’s list:
I’ve seen (from time to time on the forums) the install while windows is running fail and then succeed when installation is re-done the traditional way.
Hi.
Another suggestion. If you don’t want to keep reinstalling Windows (if they’re working OK), don’t let Grub write its boot code to the MBR. Direct it to boot up from the second partition (the SuSE partition, that is). I think that’s done in the final stages of the SuSE installation. That way, if anything goes wrong with the SuSE install, you don’t have to go through the tedious Windows installation all over again. In order for this approach to work, I would strongly advise you to select the EXT3 filesystem (well, SuSE - or maybe Novell - doesn’t like ReiserFS, JFS or XFS anyway)
Of course, you must remember to set your BIOS boot options accordingly, if needed (e.g. if you have more than one hard drive and so on).
Now, if you can’t get your HD to boot, there are two main possible reasons: you set the wrong boot device in BIOS, or - far more probably - none of your drives/partitions is marked as ACTIVE. Now for a hard drive to boot, you have to mark a partition as active. This can be done the hard way, from a DOS floppy via fdisk (if I remember right) and, far more easily, from a live linux CD (Knoppix is ideal for this) by using parted or qtparted or any other partition editor. Check out your SuSE partition and see if it’s marked as “active” or “boot” (maybe you will have to activate the advanced view - depending on which partition editor you use). After restarting, the computer should boot from your hard drive and hopefully your problem will have been solved. If, however, you get a Grub message (to the effect “Grub stage 1.5 loading” or something similar), don’t despair. Things are relatively simple to repair from this point on (by editing the menu.lst in /boot/grub as needed).
OK, I will try it again during the next weekend and will let you know the results. Hopefully your hints will help
During the meantime I tried it a second time. This time I started the oS-setup the traditional way which means I booted from the DVD.
Setup went fine and I could login to the SUSE-box, but when I restarted the machine I run into the same error like the last time. So I started the repair-option from the SUSE-DVD and reinstalled GRUB. After some tries I got a new message from GRUB: Stage 1.5 Error 17 
This time I made an DriveImage-backup from both Windows-Partitions. Unfortunately I could not restore the system from that image as I only get a message, that the partitions has been changed. Wondering about that I started a setup from the XP-CD and from there I got the info that the whole disk (120GB) is unformatted?
But my partition has been like this:
Drive C (Windows XP System) 30 GB, ntfs
Drive D (Windows Programs and Data) 60 GB, ntfs
The remaining capacity is reserved for SUSE and the SUSE-setup recognizes the unused diskspace and I let them realize its suggestions for the partitioning of this unused capacity.
Is there something I have to be aware of like not having more than one primary partition in XP or so?
I did not checked the suggestion with the BIOS, but will do this hopefully this evening.
Seems to be an BIOS issue
The notebook is equipped with the latest BIOS 3A10 from 2004 but this BIOS only detects 120GB of a harddrive, but I bought a 160GB drive as the additional 40GBs only made six euro in price
Of course Acer will not publish any further updates - in fact they have an absolutely poor software support!
Any ideas what I can do now?
Hi!
First, you should make absolutely sure that the BIOS only supports 120 GB (in fact there is no such thing as a 120 GB limit, there only exists the so-called 128 GB limit). I have a hunch that you may have somehow messed up your partition table and that the BIOS might actually recognize your whole hard drive. You should get some LiveCD-based utilities to confirm this. “The Ultimate Boot CD” would be an excellent choice. Or maybe Knoppix.
Now, if you confirm beyond any reasonable doubt that such a limit does exist in your BIOS, that’s still not a tragedy. Actually, the only thing needed may be (again, a LiveCD-based) a partition editor that does not rely on your BIOS to partition your drive. Once partitioned this way, the drive should hopefully be recognized by your BIOS. In addition, several boot-loaders exist (in fact almost every hard-drive manufacturer has one) which “prepare” your hard drive with some loader code so that the BIOS problem doesn’t occur. For more in-depth knowledge, see Accessing harddisks over 8GB/32GB/64GB/128GB without a new BIOS or a DiskManager [deinmeister.de]
Thumbs up and don’t despair;)
Windows and linux will be able to see your entire drive; they do not depend upon the bios for geometries. Make sure in your bios the drives are set to “LBA”. And don’t confuse disk size issues with the 1027 cylinder issue.
A straightforward solution which always works is to create small partitions at the front of the disk. XP can easily be installed on a ~10GB partition. Then create a second partition of ~100MB for just openSUSE’s /boot directory. The third partition can be for the rest of what you use XP for (if you use the default folders like “My Documents” under “Documents and Settings”, Windows has a feature to enable you to easily redirect those to another partition). The fourth partition is an extended primary, inside of which you create logical partitions for linux (usually 3, i.e., root, /home, and swap). You can create all the partitions in advance if you wish even from within Windows, not formatting (although it won’t really matter if you do) the linux partitions. Or you can create the extended primary partition and the logicals inside it, from the openSUSE partitioner.
With this setup it should be easy to install grub to the MBR and chainload boot back to XP from grub. Alternatively, you can install grub to the boot sector of the /boot partition, make a copy of it, put that copy file under Windows C:, and modify boot.ini to enable XP’s boot loader to boot openSUSE. There are many howto’s for this.
By the way, a point of clarification: The only boot partition that must be marked “active” is one that is booted from a generic bootstrap in the MBR, such as the code that Windows installs or is an option in openSUSE. But grub doesn’t care about this at all because wherever it’s stage1 bootstrap is installed there is included a pointer to where the stage2 loader is located; this is what it uses.
But grub doesn’t care about this at all because wherever it’s stage1 bootstrap is installed there is included a pointer to where the stage2 loader is located; this is what it uses.
Uhm … it’s precisely getting to stage1 bootstrap that may be a bit of a challenge if you install Grub loader not in the MBR, but in the boot sector of a given partition – which is what I do when I want to leave the MBR and the first partition literally untouched, such as when, to overcome the 8 GB bug on an old BIOS, the disk is installed with a disk manager, or when I’m multibooting with a certain … er … OS that is extremely sensitive to “unexpected” MBRs and/or to residing on a non-first partition.
We are probably saying the same thing. My point was that with grub stage1 installed in the MBR, marking the partition active is not necessary and of no use. Of course, if stage1 is in the partition boot sector instead, something must chainload to it - either MBR code using the active partition logic or some equivalent (such as done by various other boot managers), or chainloaded from another boot sector.
Thanks a lot for your help.
Today I decided to go the easy way:
I bought a 120GB disk and an external USB-case for 160GB disk.
With the smaller disk it has been no problem to set up the notebook as a DualBoot-system. I first installed XP, after that I started the openSUSE11.0-Setup by booting from the DVD.
All went find and so I post this message from the fresh Linux-System 
And once again I am absolutely sure never to buy something that is labeled from acer. In my opinion their stuff is not worth the money and my next notebook will be from Lenovo, Dell or HP.
However your ideas helped me to identify the BIOS as the source of my problem. The result of this issue is, that acer Travelmate series 4000 (including 4002WLMi) is not able to operate harddisk larger then 120GB as the BIOS does not cover larger disks. So thanks again for all your help and ideas
Your decision to cut it directly to the chase may have been for the best; additional storage space is always a good thing to have.