Hi
I have some very important information on the Win2003 installation so I desperately need to get back to that. I assumed that by installing over the Windows 2003 that Suse would retain the existing instalation and provide me with a menu to boot to whichever I wanted.
How can I recover this?
Angus
Ouch did you really believe that??? And did you really do a new OS install without first backing up all your important data??
If you really did install over the Windows partition it is gone. How ever you would need to take special steps to do that since the installer would not recommend that by default.
We need to see how the machine is really partitioned So you need to get a Linux based live CD. If you used an OpenSuse CD to install you could use that or any other flavor or a Pmagic CD.
In any case we need to see
fdisk -l ( that is a lower case L not a one)
As mentioned, you really do have to choose options in the installer to achieve this, so it’s possible that the boot loader just has not added an entry for windows.
That requested output of ‘fdisk -l’ as root (use ‘su -’)from a liveCD is what is needed to tell .
I have some very important information on the Win2003 installation so I desperately need to get back to that.
In the meantime don’t write anything else to the disk, competent data recovery companies, with the right equipment can recover much of what is lost (if it is).
But it may cost you an arm and a leg.
Also note that if the data you need is on an area of the disk that has been formatted only, recovery is easier.
Working backups are always important, but especially when about to install an OS or partitioning. (I just had to state the obvious!)