Hello, a few weeks ago I had a hard time getting 11.2 installed on my Win 7 box. With some help from here I got it all going, or so I thought. Sometime after the install apparently my Win 7 partition stopped being recognized by Grub, I hadn’t noticed this since most daily tasks are done in Linux. When I noticed this I went in to the boot menu (from Yast) and tried to find the problem but could not. Then when I tried to reboot again Grub did not come up at all and I had various errors concerning mtr not found (as I recall). Anyway after learning how to use Bootrec.exe on my Win 7 disk I got Windows back but now no Linux. So maybe I am wrong but after searching the forum it appears that there may be a few reasons for my challenges and it looks like each case is a bit different and I can’t just print instructions on how to repair. So my question is, what should I do in what order after I reboot 11.2 with the DVD? All my partitions are imaged so I figure it is time to start messing with things again to see if I can get a happy dual boot. All of my hardware is below. Thank you for any help.
GIGABYTE GA-790FXTA-UD5, AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb, G.SKILL Trident 4GB RAM, XFX HD-585A-ZNBC Radeon HD 5850 (Cypress Pro) 1GB Black Edition, Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB, Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB, Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, openSuse 11.2 64-bit
Have you considered loading openSuSE 11.2 on an external hard drive? If you do it right, your main computer will boot Windows normally if your external drive is disconnected and Linux is all located externally while you still have access to your Windows drive if you need it. This is the way I do it and it makes for a better dual boot computer in my opinion.
When you boot from the DVD, you are going to point the install to your external hard drive. You need to edit the default SuSE install boot setup so that you put a generic boot sector on the external hard drive and I normally locate GRUB in the Linux partition. The idea is to have a fully stand alone Linux setup on the external hard drive. Your computer must support booting from an external USB hard drive which you must put it at the top of the hard disk booting order in your BIOS. Further, you do this before you load SuSE, so the hard drive assignments work out and your CDROM must boot before any hard drive.
You can ask for more details if you need them. Doing this will not bring back your old installation, but you may be able to copy any information from the old partition if it still exists.
Thank you for the replies, I read Michael’s other post. I am already pretty confident that I can get suse to boot again, my concern is I will end up with no bootable Win 7 partitions again. Using an external HD is an option I guess but if possible I would rather use a piece of my second Tb hard drive. I used to be able to do this with XP, it has not been so easy for 7 it would appear. Thanks for any help.
Great, so after I do the repair if I post what the menu.lst file says, someone can tell me what it should be for 7 to be added to the boot options? When I searched for this problem it looked like there were a few different possibilities to make it work properly. Thanks for the help.