I need to be able to boot WinXP so I can run some apps such as 3D CAD programs like Archicad and Revit. So far as I know these will not run in Wine or any virtual machines available to suse; for sure they didn’t work in VirtualBox. If anyone knows better, please do tell.
Problem was, my old WinXP install was badly corrupted, although it did dual boot. So, I decided to do what every Windoze user does regularly, do a clean install. When I tried this I of course selected to reformat C:\ and install fresh there. After doing this and installing the install files the win installer reboots and runs off the files it installed on the hd to finish the installation. Problem was, when it got to that point in wouldn’t work at all. I also couldn’t get suse to boot, and found all my partitions apparently messed up.
Not to worry; I put the 11.2 DVD in and did a repair install and this got my system back up and running as it was.
I still have an NTFS part as the first part of hdd0, mounted as windows in suse with 640MB used, so I should be able to do a clean install of Winblows if I knew what to do. Can anyone help me out with this?
A word to the wise: I did stumble around for a couple hours because everytime it tried to boot up it hung up in rl3. After several frustrating retries I read the messages more carefully and found it was trying to fsck a partition that no longer existed. I had previously deleted the swap, root and home parts of hdd0 where my original linux install had been (now on a new 1TB drive) and partitioned them as one ext4 part for data storage. Boot process kept trying to check one of these and wouldn’t go past that. Finally booted from DVD and mounted root partition and opened fstab and sure enough, there was the nonexistant partition. Deleted it and checked all the other entries and booted no problem. Moral: when you make changes to your partitions, check fstab to be sure everything is correct and edit by hand if necessary.