I have a triple boot system with WinXP in a primary partition and Suse 10.3
and 11.1 in separate partions on an extended partition.
My original set up contained only XP and 10.3. When 11.0 came along I
followed my usual practice of loading a new version in a new partition.
Since 11.0 wouldn’t support my Wacom Bamboo tablet in a VirtualBox virtual
machine, I stayed with 10.3. Finally when 11.1 arrived I replaced 11.0
with it and since the tablet now works as I want I have been using 11.1
almost exclusively ever since.
Now to the problem. Grub was initially installed on the 10.3 partition to
boot from the MBR and has stayed there till now i.e. I did not install a
boot manager on the 11.1 partition. I decided to change by going into Yast
and having my 11.1 partition take care of booting. All I ended up with was
a system which wouldn’t boot. Firing up the DVD and trying to repair the
installation also did not work. I finally had to restore my system by
cloning from a backup.
The next thing I tried was to delete the extended partition so I could add
another primary partition for Win 7 and create a new extended partition
into which I cloned my 11.1 and and home partitions from the backup setting
up the partitioning so that the root partition number for 11.1 would be the
same as the original 10.3 partition number. Since the disk numbering
changed I figured that simply repairing the installion from the DVD would
solve any problems. This also did not work. I once again had to restore
my complete system from the backup in order to get a working system. I
should also mention that I edited the fstab file to reflect the new
partitioning setup
It seems that booting is forever linked to my original 10.3 installation.
Can some grub expert tell me how to do the following since I obviously don’t
understand grub.
I want to
a) retain the original XP primary partition.
b) set up a new primary partition for W7.
c) set up a new extended partition into which I would clone the backups of
my 11.1 and home partitions.
Surely this must be possible without having to do a complete reinstall of
11.1.
Something just occurred to me. Could the problem be that I have continued
to use the old /dev/sdx designations in the fstab file rather than the new
disk-by-id designations?
Allan