Hello, I installed OpenSuse 10.3 on my laptop about 6 months ago and setup a dual boot with vista. The other night I was on vista when itunes froze and, no matter what I did, couldn’t get it to close, so I was forced to just turn the power off. When I restart now though I get stuck on grub error 18. After reading into grub error 18 a bit, I have no idea how this problem could have occurred, everything had been running fine since I first installed it. Any idea what happened and how to fix it?
I don’t know how that happened. It’s usually on older computers that can’t boot to larger than 8Gb or something like that. But I don’t know for your case. If your Grub is now pointing to the wrong place, you might get the error. Anyway, I suggest you just reinstall Grub. You use to 10.3 install DVD to boot the existing Suse 10.3 installation and then reinitialise Grub using Yast. It’s written in full detail on this tutorial: GRUB Boot Multiboot openSUSE Windows (2000, XP, Vista) using the Grub bootloader.
Ok, I started following that guide, but I’ve ran into a new problem. When I try to boot installed system, the CD only shows my windows partitions, it doesnt seem to be able to find the linux ones. Any idea how i lost them, and how I can gain access to them again. The laptop is pretty new, about 6-7 months old, so I still don’t get why it says error 18. Also, now that I think about it, the laptop has 2 hard drives, and it appears to only be recognizing the 1st one, so maybe that could be the issue.
Ok, now my real newbieness will show through, I’m in the BIOS setup utility and I can’t find where the HD info is. The only thing that I see thats related is the HD diagnostic tests, under that it does have a selection to test both primary and secondary hard disks. When I run the diagnostics test on the 2nd disk I either get diagnostics not supported error or i also got #10009 replace hard disk. So I guess I got a bad hard disk, any idea what could cause 1 to go bad in just 6 months?