"invalid partition table" after windows xp installation over Opensuse, help needed!

English Install/Boot/Login
1

ok, I wasn’t able to find any good example of my situation, so I shall make a thread about it. I had windows 7 and opensuse 11.3 dual boot system, with 60GB under windows and other space was partitioned among 3(inc. swap) linux partitions respectively. So I got tired of windows 7 and decided to switch back to good old and light windows xp. I created a boot cd, formatted my 60GB partition and installed windows xp there, when I was prompted to reboot and did it, I saw a message “invalid partition table”. SO what I think is that GRUB was lost and now, nothing can make my system go up. I have a live KDE USB in my hands that I created just now, I tried to install GRUB into MBR with no success via live cd, same message appears. What should I do to get things right?
Oh by the way, my windows 7 somehow had another little 10mb(recovery?) partition that is now left unformatted on the drive.

2

It’s not very difficult. There are different methods. Here’s a simple one:

  • Boot from PartedMagic and use the partiton editor (gparted) to delete all Windows partitions. Don’t touch the Linux partitions!
  • In the freed space, create a single NTFS partition
  • Boot from XP installation CD and install XP in that partition (reformat it during setup!)
  • Now you’ll have XP, but only XP will boot.
  • Boot again from ParteMagic and install Grub into MBR (it will do it for now)
    There are thousands of posts and Howtos… Here’s the latest one: How to Reinstall the grub?. Just replace setup (hd0,3) in this example with setup (hd0).
  • Now you’ll have openSUSE. You’ll just have to add this entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst to boot Windows:
###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifierL Original name: Windows###
title Windows
   root (hd0,0)
   chainloader +1
3

To get an idea about what your partition table looks like (if it i still there), boot any live CD or install CD/DVD in rescue mode and use

fdisk -l

on the system disk. Post here (between CODE tags).

EDIT, I did not read above answer (about same time posting). Try it, mine is only a first step iin the same direction (and with different tools).

4

ok, yeah, just digged deeper and found a solution and nice howto’s about what to do in this situation, I created a temp boot flag in my windows partition via fdisk on live cd, then I will recreate it on my suse partition to make it work and do all the stuff with grub from there. Thank you for answers, they will come very useful.