Hey guys - linux newbie here, and I’m really looking forward to working with SUSE. I have a dual boot issue, however. The issue is talked about here and on other forums, but when I try any of the solutions set forth so far it simply doesn’t work, so I thought I’d make my own post and get some advice. Keep in mind I am very new to linux.
My computer has two hard drives - a SATA drive and an IDE drive. When I did the SUSE install (from LiveCD), the SATA drive was drive 1 in the BIOS (it has the Windows XP installation) and the IDE drive was drive 2.
After install, I find that the BIOS has been switched so that the IDE drive with the SUSE install is first. That’s fine with me.
When I boot with the IDE drive first, I get the GRUB menu, and if I choose SUSE everything is fine. If I choose Windows XP, the contents of the menu.lst file appear on the screen and it hangs there. I’ve tried editing menu.lst in numerous ways, and I get either the same thing or a filesystem error.
If I go into BIOS and put the SATA drive with the Windows installs as drive 1, then Windows boots fine but I don’t get the GRUB menu so I can’t select SUSE.
I have done what others have suggested in terms of putting the “map” command lines in the menu.lst file, and that doesn’t help.
Any suggestions? I do not want to have to go into BIOS every time I boot to go between Windows and Linux.
I appreciate any advice you all have!
Thanks.
Update:
I did sudo fdisk -l from SUSE.
The Windows drive has two partitions. The asterisk indicating “boot” comes after /dev/sdb2 instead of /dev/sdb1. Does that impact what I need to do in GRUB menu.lst?
You need to post back here the output of several files. If you’ve already done some research, you probably know what these are. IME it reduces/eliminates a lot of back-and-forth posting, to just get all this data up front. General descriptions won’t do, there are important details and subtleties. So from a terminal in openSUSE, switch to root or use sudo to do these commands:
fdisk -lu
cat /boot/grub/device.map
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
cat /etc/grub.conf
lspci
Just fyi, however openSUSE was installed, that did not make a change to the bios configuration. The settings you see in the bios are written only by the bios to the firmware in the cmos device; neither Windows nor openSUSE touches this. (There are a few specialized 3rd-party programs that can; these are most often supplied by the motherboard manufacturer which along with the company that writes the bios, are the only entities that possesses the bios code. The only other way to know how to write this code is to reverse engineer it.)
Thanks for answering, Mingus. I appreciate it.
I have it working now, actually. After doing more searching on this forum and others I changed root (hd0,1) to rootnoverify (hd1,1) and it worked. Just a matter of pointing GRUB to the right place it seems.
Thanks again!
Sure, you’re welcome. Glad you got it working. 