My brother installed opensuse 11.1 the other day (i was not home when he did it, so I don’t know the options he specified) and it boots and runs fine if you use the “boot from hard drive” option on the live disk. However if you try to boot without it all you get is a bit of text that says “mbr error” So my thinking is grub didn’t get installed or configured properly. Is there a way to fix this without trashing the installed system, or do we have to do a wipe/reinstall?
Might be worrying, probably just corruption though. Might be worth running a media check on your CD/DVD, just to check that isn’t the source of the error - it could have broken other things without you noticing.
If you can get to a root prompt on your CD/DVD, try this;
SERIOUS HELP WANTED! - LOST ACCESS TO IMPORTANT DATA. - Page 3 - openSUSE Forums
Sometimes the hard drive designation as seen by the bios (?) is different depending whether there is a mounted CD/DVD in the DVD device. If that’s true in this case then Confuseling’s method might not work because it will put back the same bootloader as already exists.
By all means try that out, but if it doesn’t work, I think you should try this: use the live cd method to “boot from the hard drive” and get into openSUSE. Then take the live cd out of the drive. Then re-calculate the whole bootloader and link it to the master boot record, using the Yast bootloader module. The re-calculation method is set out in the appendix of a related tutorial: APPENDIX: Installing a brand new bootloader once you’ve booted into openSUSE
Good luck