Folks,
I have a dell vostro 1700 which has two HD bays and was recently running Vista quite happily with just one drive. I recently bought a 500Gb HD and put it in the second bay. Vista saw it and I formatted it just fine with NTFS.
I then tried to dual boot with Open Suse 11.0. I accepted the default partitioning scheme which left the original drive alone, and reduced the partition on the second drive to 150Gb and installed all three suse partitions in the ~300Gb remaining on the second drive.
My boot screen now has options for windows 1,2,3 and SuSe 11 plus Suse failsafe and floppy. Suse boots just fine, none of the windows partitions boot at all.
Could someone give me some advice on what I need to do to get my Vista partition booting please? (or at least give me some advice on what specifics to post?)
Thanks very much
Miles
OK, booting each windows option in turn, the computer hangs with:
(for windows 1)
rootnoverify (hd1,5)
chainloader (hd0,1)+1
(for windows 2)
rootnoverify (hd1,5)
chainloader (hd0,2)+1
(for windows 3)
rootnoverify (hd1,5)
chainloader (hd 1,0)_1
BOOTMGR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart
There are three windows partitions on the first HD. OS, DellUtility and RECOVERY. Only one would be bootable, I’m not sure which one is being referred to by each option in the grub screen…
OK, solved it. For some reason you can change the partition in YAST/Bootloader but not the disk. I kept trying to point one of the windows options to partition sd0,3 which was correct but the hd entry wasn’t visible and didn’t change so the “rootnoverify” line and the “chainloader” line didn’t match.
I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst manually to
Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Fri Dec 5 17:18:00 GMT 2008
default 3
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd1,5)/boot/message
###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title openSUSE 11.0 - 2.6.25.18-0.2
root (hd1,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25.18-0.2-default root=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_SAMSUNG_H
M500LIS1PTJD0Q908020-part6 resume=/dev/sdb5 splash=silent showopts vga=0x346
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.25.18-0.2-default
###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows 1###
title Dell Diagnostics
rootnoverify (hd1,5)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1
###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows 2###
title VISTA
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
chainloader (hd0,2)+1
###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: floppy###
title Floppy
rootnoverify (hd1,5)
chainloader (fd0)+1
which worked fine for my system.
Then I went back and broke it again with YaST when I changed the labels so I had to re-edit the hd entries again.
I think the grub editor is a bit broken in its current state
I think the grub editor is a bit broken in its current state
Kgrubeditor?
Did you know that in YaST Boot Loader you can see the changes to menu.lst which making changes in the gui, will produce? Under the Other button, click on Edit Configuration Files. There is an editing window there, too. Change menu.lst and it will be reflected back under the gui. A chainloading stanza often needs to be defined manually, although if you use Propose New Configuration under the Other button, YaST may very well find the other boot sector and create the stanza. It will use device.map (also editable there) for disk/grub mapping.
Under Boot Location you can specify alternate partition boot sectors. If installing grub to a different disk MBR is desired, go to Edit Config Files and change grub.conf to the desired disk; it will be reflected back in the gui under Boot Loader Location.
