Losing openSuse 11.1 instalation after reboot

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi everyone, I’ve come across a very strange problem I was hoping you could help me solve, I’ll be as detailed as I can about it.

Here we go,

After using openSuse for over a year on my PC it was my first choice when I got my laptop (HP Pavilion 1023cl, Intel Core2Duo 2.0Ghz geForce 9600, 4gigs ram), like expected it came with Vista, which a had planned on keeping along with suse, then problems began.

The laptop didnt come with vista install dvd but only a recovery partition which prevents me from a clean install. Tried resizing the partitions but vista wouldnt let me, tried a lot of things (turn off hibernation, delete page file, etc etc) and no luck.

Then tried EASUS Partition Master 3.5 (Gparted wouldnt work either) and it worked, shrinked Vista partition, created another primary partition to store data and created an extended partition to hold linux.

Everything went smoothly, installed openSuse 11.1 with no problem at all, leaving the partition table like this:

Primary 80Gb NTFS Vista
Primary 160Gb NTFS Data
Extended 25 Gb Linux
2 Gb Swap
15 Gb ext3 /
10 Gb ext3 /home
Primary 10Gb HP Recovery

Like I said, I had no problem installing, rebooted and tried Vista, no problem, rebooted back to Suse, no problem, grub even recognized HP Recovery partition and it worked just fine.

Went to bed, and the next day, there was no Grub, went straight to Vista. OpenSuse recovery option on the DVD says “No root partition found” when trying to restore grub or trying to start an existing linux installation.

I used a Slax livecd to check linux partitions (sda6 and sda7) and they are just fine, ran a fsck.ext3 -f and reported no problems. I mounted the partitions and have read/write access to files, everything seems to be ok.

However, cfdisk reports that partition 1 ends in the wrong cylinder (I can post the exact message if needed) and refuses to read the partition table.

I was thinking the whole resizing thing messed up the partition table, and if thats the case, was hoping I could correct this without having to start from scratch.

Thank you.

Hio.

2

Have you been supplied recovery disc’s for vista? If not, you might want to create them.

Boot a live CD and from a su terminal give us:

fdisk -l

It should be possible to boot SUSE with something like Super Grub Disk

3 

$fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x4b27c1bc

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       10199    81920128+   7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2           10199       34253   193210920    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3           37440       38914    11840512    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda4           34254       37439    25591545    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5           34254       34514     2096451   82  Linux swap
/dev/sda6           34515       36472    15727603+  83  Linux
/dev/sda7           36473       37439     7767396   83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order
4

Not pretty is it. How on earth did you end up with this?

Use the the suse install dvd to try and repair the bootoader. Some guidance here:
GRUB Boot Multiboot openSUSE Windows (2000, XP, Vista) using the Grub bootloader.

5

Well, I blame EASUS Partition Master 3.5.

I tried Super Grub Loader and no luck, tried every auto and manual setup and coulnt get it to boot, it finds a previous grub installation and shows me my previous boot menu but none of the options load, keeps telling me it cant find the kernel image as if the partition was inaccessible, but like I said, I checked it was fine using a livecd

Tried with openSuse repair and like I said in my initial post it doesnt work, comes up with “No root found”, as if there is no suse installation at all.

Is there a way to rectify the partition table? its a mess.

Oh, I should add, Vista is booting just fine, and the 2nd partition is working too, but its going straight to windows.

6

Like I said. Make a set of restore discs from within Vista.
Then if things go downhill - you have a way back.

Then try changing the boot flag away from the Vista partition to either sda4 or sda6

The boot flag is shown by the *
Use Parted magic to change this.

7

Thanks for the help so far. I made the HP Recovery DVDs.

However, tried changing the boot flag to and put it on the linux partition and still wont boot. Is there any program to verify and correct a partition table? to this point I dont care if its free or commercial, the least I want is having to start from scratch.

8

How I hate the pc makers’ recovery partitions! You can usually do nothing with them.
Easiest, from your point of view is to recover your original system - if you haven’t deleted the recovery partition, the recovery disk you got with the pc should do this - if it was a boot option, you need to get it back.
Once recovered, try downloading the first (boot) cd for suse enterprise desktop and use this to resize the disk. Once resized and partitioned, go back to opensuse.
I tried Win7 and opensuse made a hash of it but sled fixed it!
BTW, if you do recover it successfully, it’s not a bad idea to use something like ghost to write the new image to the recovery partition - normally the system makers make it a hidden partion and it is found using the recovery disk.
Just depends how much you need windows
Having supported and run windows networks and software, I now only use windows when I have to and missed vista out completely. Use xp-64 instead.

9

I dont think using HP Recovery would solve the problem, already did a recovery when I tried gparted to resize vista partition and left windows partition inaccessible (raw). It worked, but I noticed it left the partition table intact, it only formats the 1st partition it finds and installs the system there. So if the partition table is so messed up, I have to find a way to solve that first.

10

I have a suggestion.

Boot the suse dvd and procedd as if for install, then at this screen: Installation/11.1 DVD Install - openSUSE
Choose the Repair option
Then look for the ‘Expert’ option (because we know where we want to go)

Look for the ‘Booting/Bootloader’, we want to repair that
Then it should look like this:
http://files.myopera.com/carl4926/albums/671478/16.png
http://files.myopera.com/carl4926/albums/671478/17.png
http://files.myopera.com/carl4926/albums/671478/18.png

In the 3rd Pic You need to choose ONLY the MBR option, uncheck anything else.

OK all that and see how you go.

11

Forgot to come back and thank everyone, simply by changing grub option to MBR fixed the problem rotfl!

Now, I dont know if its opensuse installation or grub as it is, but it keeps using “Disk by ID” instead of partitions, even when specified other wise manually, every time opensuse repair opens up the configuration it changes it back to Disk by ID, wich doesnt work. It could by my laptop model, I dont know.

Thanks again for the help.

12

Good to hear you are back in business. But I’m not sure what issue you are trying to describe now. Disk by ID is standard in 11.1, but you can set it differently in Yast.
I would need to be clear though about what you want to do, what your problem is? Before I could help further.

13

Well its working fine as it is, but if I modify anything on grub using Yast it switches back to Disk ID mode, so I have to change it again manually. But I wont be changing grub again so I dont think it’ll give me any more problems.