New Motherboard, Previous Install of SUSE won't work

Spilled water on my laptop, and had to have the motherboard replaced. The Geek Squad (bad word, I know, right?) put a very similar but slightly different motherboard in… and POOF there goes SUSE.

I was running an 11.2/ win7 dual boot all x64.

Been battling with GRUB for days now, trying out different solutions from google, and nothing has seemed to get my SUSE back.

I was able to do a little bit of jacking with GRUB and I can get into M$ now, but still can’t get SUSE to boot. Used to come up with Error 15 (File Not Found) but after doing some tweaking and installing 11.3 onto a new partition, I now get a “invalid file format” message pointing to my kernel.

I’m gonna admit, I feel like I’m waaayyy in over my head, but I have files that I can’t seem to get access to in my root directory from the old install, and I realllllyyyyy freaking want to beat this thing. I’ve been trying to learn as much about linux as I possibly can, and I would much rather actually solve this than go the easy route and wipe everything out…

Granted, if its not possible…

It’s not possible!

Thanks Guys!
rotfl!

On 09/17/2011 06:16 AM, silverslasher wrote:

> I was running an 11.2/ win7 dual boot all x64.

hmmmm… 11.2 has pasted its end of life…you probably need to move up
to something supported anyway, but maybe it is possible to do as you
wish (not blast it all away with a fresh install)

> Been battling with GRUB for days now, trying out different solutions
> from google, and nothing has seemed to get my SUSE back.

use great care with google, because you may very easily get the
correct answer for the same (apparent) problem but for Mandrake 7.3’s
LILO which will NOT be correct for your grub (and, even the right answer
for a recent Ubuntu grub may/will NOT work with our “legacy grub”

when using google to ‘fix’ an openSUSE problem you are best off using
the google site specifier to force search only within the openSUSE
universe, with a search string

site:opensuse.org repair grub

patience is a very very good thing, and the more you have the more
likely you will reach your goal!

you gave a lot of info, but not enough…i wonder if you have a live CD
and if it will boot, and if it does, if you can use it to run out some
useful info for the gurus here to look at…if you can please show us
the terminal in/output from


df -h
cat /proc/partitions
cat /etc/fstab
mount
sudo /sbin/fdisk -l
sudo cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

copy/paste the output back to this thread using the instructions here:
http://goo.gl/i3wnr

oh, and if you have any photos/emails/etc etc on that drive you can’t
live without, this would be a good time (while you wait for the gurus to
show up) to copy/backup that stuff to an off machine hard disk, usb
drive, optical media, floppies, tape drive, cave wall or whatever you
have handy…

finally, i suggest that you not attempt an ‘upgrade’ since every known
upgrade path assumes you being with a fully functional system…and,
whatever you do do not try to upgrade from 11.2 to 11.4, the only
rational way to get from 11.2 to 11.4 is to save off all data and do a
format install…you could try to not format home and keep it, but i
have best results by letting the install script build a new home and
then i copy data (photos, music, mail, letter to Aunt Tilly, etc ) from
the old home (on a different drive) to the new…

give the gurus the chance to help you get 11.2 going and then you can
decide to go with Evergreen, or upgrade to 11.3, and later to 11.4 . . .


DD
Caveat
openSUSE®, the “German Automobiles” of operating systems