Need some advice

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I’m currently dual-booting OpenSUSE 11.2 and Vista SP2. Originally I had Vista installed on a 250 GB hard drive. It was failing and I wanted to move Vista to another hard drive before the damage was too far gone and would lose my data. I purchased a 500 GB hard drive and cloned the image to the new drive. Well needless to say it would not boot up after the transfer of the image. I ran supergrub and it fixed it temporally and I have been able to dual-boot between the 2 OS’s for the last couple of months with no problems.

So now I want to remove the old hard drive and throw it out, and after I removed the old hard drive and powered up, it gave me a grub error 21 I believe. I ran supergrub again and I was able to boot up Vista. After I shutdown and restarted and got the same grub error again. I turned off the PC and installed the old hard drive back in and the grub error went away and was able to boot up both OS’s with no problems. I didn’t have time to figure out what the problem was and it stayed this way for awhile. Now I can hear the old hard drive making the unforgettable sound of failure. So now I want to remove it.

My question is: Can I use the Grub editor in OpenSUSE 11.2, that I install awhile back, and use the wizard to move Grub to the Master boot record of one of the good hard drives, I’m assuming the old hard drive still holds the boot record and that’s why I can boot with no error and when I remove the old hard drive I get a Grub error and cannot boot up any OS.

So can I use the wizard in Grub Editor to move Grub to one of the other drives, and if I can do I move it to the hard drive that OpenSUSE is installed or should I move it to the Vista hard drive which also happens to be the 1st drive in the system and the BIOS see’s first as well or IMO the OpenSUSE drive.

I believe it would be better to move Grub to the OpenSUSE hard drive to prevent any problem with Vista, some suggestions would help.

Should I use Supergrub vs. Grub Editor? Which is safer? If your suggestion is the supergrub could you provide me with the steps and which supergrub version I should use to have a safe transfer.

Thanks in advanced for all your help.

2

Actually you want a new MBR the new drive will have a different geometry. So you should be able to use Supergrub to create a new MBR record and point to the Suse root/boot partition. Assuming the sequence of partitions are the same on the new drive it should just work. If they are not you may have to edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

Alt. you could simply boot up the Suse install and do a repair to grub. Again you may need to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file

3

I would start by examining all partitions in use on the new hdd to make sure none are still on the old hdd. If you find /boot / /home etc still on the old hdd this can be a problem that needs to be resolved before you edit/change the mbr.

4

Thanks for you advice, The good news is that the old hard drive had Vista installed on it and not Linux, so no /Home /boot so I can move foward without that issue.

Thanks