This message could be subtitled ‘a little bit of knowledge cause a
disaster!’
I have a reasonably new laptop running (ugh) Windows Vista Home Premium. I
attempted to put OpenSUSW 11 on an external hard drive. Actually, I
succeeded in installing the linux OS. Unfortunately, this destroyed (or at
least corrupted) the MBR. Consequently, while I could boot the machine in
linux but not Vista. Now, losing vista would not be a bad thing, except for
the fact that I use the laptop for some tasks at work.
I ended up having to purchase a recovery disk from HP as I couldn’t find the
disk I made when I bought the laptop. That involved multiple calls to
idiots
on the Indian subcontinent, but that’s another tale of woe. It only took me
about a week to restore vista on the laptop
In my study I have a tower booting OpenSUSE 10.3. It finds the external
drive:
After this rather long preamble, my question is the following. Is there a
SAFE (defined as not destroying access to the OpenSUSE 10.3) way to boot the
machine in OpenSUSE 11.0?