Long time ago , I moved from Ubuntu to Linux OpenSUSE . I formatted my laptop , then installed Linux OpenSUSE . It had had Ubuntu + Windows . I sent a while without Windows . After that, I’ve installed Windows , and the problem happened .
As we all know , when there’s Windows and Linux on the same computer , there’s a menu appears when booting up to choose which OS We want . In my laptop , after I installed Windows , this menu doesn’t appear , as well as Windows boots up directly .
I didn’t have such problem before , because I always used to install Linux after I install windows . However this time I did the opposite !
I tried to remove Windows , but the laptop said : There is no operating system .
As there anyway to recover that menu , and let Windows and Linux work side by side ??
Of course there is.
First off, do you have a live CD handy?
And, do you want GRUB (the Linux menu), the Windows Boot Manager, or do you just want something that works?
You need to boot a live linux (from CD or DVD) then browse to your main OpenSuSE installation and get your /boot/grub/menu.lst file and make a copy and save it somewhere.
Then you use the OpenSuSE CD/DVD to “repair” - actually, to reinstall the GRUB bootloader. But this will not find your Windows or other OpenSuSE installation. That information is in your menu.lst file. So after you do the repair / reinstallGRUB, then you copy the old /boot/grub/menu.lst over the one that was “repaired.” Then when you reboot, you should be able to see the other OS’s.
I think there may also be a “browse” option when repairing to locate other OS’s but I’ve never used that and wouldn’t want to get the syntax wrong. Someone else will probably chime in here and let me know if I’ve missed anything…
I didn’t understand your way perfectly . Why do I have to copy the old menu.lst file over the new one ??
May that affect my Windows ??
How can I reinstall the Grub itself ?? In fact I do not know how to do that !
About locating other OS’s , does that mean if there’s no such option , or there’s an error with this , I may have the same problem I had but with Windows ??
What you are going to do:
Boot up into the LiveCD.
Mount a flash drive (if it doesn’t get autodetected)
In a terminal:
sudo mkdir /mnt/flash
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/flash
then
sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /mnt/flash/
If it is autodetected, just drag & drop.
The reason copying the menu.lst is important is that when you reinstall Grub (which is what you’re doing) it will not auto-detect Windows (or we think it won’t). It will allow you to boot into Linux where you will copy the menu.lst from the flash drive (this menu.lst has windows) to the new Grub. Then you can dual-boot again. No matter what happens, you won’t lose Windows. You’re not even touching it.
Onto reinstalling Grub:
In a terminal:
sudo grub
This will launch you into a grub shell.
find /boot/grub/stage1
The output should be something like (hd0,3)
Substitute that value in for the following:
