I have a new HP DL380 G5 Quad core system, I am installing OpenSUSE 11 from DVD. everything runs through fine, I finish the install and it boots to my fresh install. when I reboot the system doesn’t find GRUB or any OS. I must be missing something. please advise
When installing check that you’ve set GRUB to place itself in the MBR.
Could be there where already partitions defined before installing openSUSE so it did not default to this?
You could also try to boot the install DVD with the repair option and see if you can fix the boot/GRUB using that.
If it was just a matter of setting the bootable flag on the partition, you didn’t need to do a reinstall to make that happen. Any rescue disk with fdisk would have done the job.
However it is true that failing to set the bootable flag can cause the BIOS to ignore the disk for booting. I discovered this the other day with an Intel BIOS. Typical symptom is that the BIOS won’t boot from HD but you can boot it from the DVD/CD menu entry labelled Boot Hard Disk. GRUB doesn’t care about the bootable flag, but the BIOS might care.