Hermid I’m having an issue with getting window 7 to boot from Grub, when it goes to boot I get a message telling me to install a recovery CD etc.
When I was installing Suse, I got this error message saying “Can not set mount point for Windows C, patition may be mounted by another program”(I was also having trouble mounting partitions while running opensuse from the DVD)
Secand I enabled both harddisk mount point and MBR Mount point on Grub(This may have what caused the issue with windows not booting)
should I boot from the MBR or Harddisk? I just reinstalled windows, and want to know what to do before I try to reinstall opensuse.
So, not sure what you have done but if you have converted a Basic NTFS partition to Dynamic, that can prevent it from working properly. You always boot from the MBR on the disk selected as the boot disk from your BIOS. With openSUSE, there is just a question if you installed Grub into the MBR or into the main “/” openSUSE partition. For any disk to boot anything, the MBR on that disk must be working. Here are some more partitioning facts:
Each hard drive can have up to four PRIMARY partitions, any of which could be marked active and bootable. No matter what you might hear, only one of the first four primary partitions can be booted from. That means you can boot from Primary partitions 1, 2, 3 or 4 and that is all. In order to boot openSUSE, you must load openSUSE and the grub boot loader into one of the first four partitions. Or, your second choice is to load the grub boot loader into the MBR (Master Boot Record) at the start of the disk. The MBR can be blank, like a new disk, it can contain a Windows partition booting code or generic booting code to boot the active partition 1, 2, 3, or 4. Or, as stated before, it can contain the grub boot loader. Why load grub into the MBR then? You do this so that you can “boot” openSUSE from a logical partition, numbered 5 or higher, which is not normally possible. In order to have more than four partitions, one of them (and only one can be assigned as extended) must be a extended partition. It is called an Extended Primary Partition, a container partition, it can be any one of the first four and it can contain one or more logical partitions within. Anytime you see partition numbers 5, 6 or higher for instance, they can only occur inside of the one and only Extended Primary partition you could have.
What does openSUSE want as far as partitions? It needs at minimum a SWAP partition and a “/” partition where all of your software is loaded. Further, it is recommended you create a separate /home partition, which makes it easier to upgrade or reload openSUSE without losing all of your settings. So, that is three more partitions you must add to what you have now. What must you do to load and boot openSUSE from an external hard drive? Number one, you must be able to select your external hard drive as the boot drive in your BIOS setup. Number two, you need to make sure that the external hard drive, perhaps /dev/sdb, is listed as the first hard drive in your grub device.map file and listed as drive hd0. I always suggest that you do not load grub into the MBR, but rather into the openSUSE “/” root primary partition which means a primary number of 1, 2, 3 or 4. If number one is used, then that will be out. You will mark the openSUSE partition as active for booting and finally you must load generic booting code into the MBR so that it will boot the openSUSE partition. I suggest a partition like this:
- /dev/sda, Load MBR with generic booting code
- /dev/sda1, Primary NTFS Partition for Windows
- /dev/sda2, Primary SWAP (4 GB)
- /dev/sda3, Primary EXT4 “/” openSUSE Partition Marked Active for booting (80-120 GB)
- /dev/sda4, Primary EXT4 “/home” Your main home directory (Rest of the disk)
OR
- /dev/sdb, Load MBR with generic booting code
- /dev/sdb1, Primary SWAP (4 GB)
- /dev/sdb2, Primary EXT4 “/” openSUSE Partition Marked Active for booting (80-120 GB)
- /dev/sdb3, Primary EXT4 “/home” Your main home directory (Rest of the disk)
When looking at Windows 7, it seems to create two partitions, one small booting one and a second much larger one that is where most of Windows is located. You normally elect to boot from the smaller Windows partition. Some computers may even have a third small partition which allows you to do a restore of Windows and normally you would NEVER boot from a restore partition if one existed. For WIndows 7, the small partition will be NTFS while for restore partitions are FAT32.
Thank You,