Hmmm, I appreciate the cautious planning. Of course, no need to over-engineer; that can lead to complications . . .
What if I change the partitions with the Vista Disk Part utilility, what does it do? Would it try to mess with the MBR? It should not, but I have no idea as to how it works. And what would happen if it decides to mess with the MBR, when grub is in the MBR. So then I thought perhaps I should put the MBR back to the way Vista likes, and then run Vista Disk Part Utility, and only then re-install openSUSE.
Diskpart does not touch the MBR. It is the Windows equivalent of the Linux parted (used by gparted and YaST). But since you can do it either way and you’re going to reinstall openSUSE, sure, put the Vista MBR back in first.
Then I started thinking about the openSUSE RC1 install. What if it goes astray during the install, and doesn’t install properly ? The MBR would point to a /boot/grub/menu.lst which has been wiped, so the PC would not boot correctly (until I fix this) ! But if the Vista MBR is in place, it is only if the problem occurs after the MBR is written that there would be a boot problem. Otherwise no temporary boot problem.
Right. As we discussed earlier, your primary risk is in anything non-Vista touching the first three records in the partition table. Your secondary risk is installing a non-Vista MBR because occasionally custom things are done with it and/or the table which the grub installation program could not know about. So again, replacing the Vista MBR first is the way to go.
I also started thinking about the user friendliness of the openSUSE partitioning tool. I decided it was not so user friendly when it came to taking an existing 100 GByte extended “partition area” (with a / and /home and swap) and merging that with the unassigned part from a shrunk Vista partition. … Hence I might wish to use a 3rd party tool (such as gparted or parted magic) to take the now available unassigned area from Vista, and merge that with openSUSE-11.1 beta5’s partitions, effectively wiping and merging that area.
Now IMHO this is getting a wee bit over-complicated. All the tools you describe are exactly the same under the hood; they use the parted library. The UI differs, but what they can do is identical. The unassigned area is simply those sectors on the disk which follow the “ending sector” as specified in the 3rd partition record in the table. When you create the 4th primary as an extended, it will start after the end of the 3rd and end at the last sector on the disk. The logicals fit inside. Just use the available space to create this all fresh. As a matter of fact, you could do that in Vista too, either with diskpart or from the Disk Management gui.
But if I use a 3rd party tool to merge the existing extended partition, with the unassigned part from the 3rd primary partition, this means the /boot/grub/menu.lst is wiped again, and hence once again, until the MBR is restored, means the PC can not boot.
So if I restore the MBR to Vista first, it means the PC can boot up to Vista right up until the last minute (while I mess around with partitions), when the openSUSE-11.1 RC1 partition is written.
Complicated, but correct.
I only want to leave Vista in control briefly. I don’t plan to use Easy BCD. Its an unknown quantity, and being unknown, its kind of scary.
It wouldn’t hurt to install EasyBCD, check the short online tutorial, and just take a look at it. It is very simple, it’s hard to get oneself into trouble with it. And while new to you, it’s being used by a zillion Vista users (the MS tool, bcdedit, is a nightmare, hence the popularity of EasyBCD). What I can guarantee you is that it is safer than grub installing to the MBR; EasyBCD won’t be touching the MBR at all.
But the partition boot sector (“bootrec /fixboot”) method appeared to be so simple - its VERY tempting to use … I’m not so keen on researching another method … ??
This is why I suggested reading the page at Multibooters. This command is not doing anything for you. Nada. Zilch. The /fixboot argument reinstalls the Vista program named “bootmgr” into the active partition boot sector, which is already there. It does not touch the MBR in any way, shape, or form (the /fixmbr argument is what does that; they are entirely distinct from one another).
I think my first priority has to be explore what this Dell Rescue CD/DVD (for Vista) is capable of doing, without my actually doing anything with it.
That’s fine, but it is highly unlikely that the Recovery Environment is on it. It is conceivable that there could be a Dell-written utility that performs similar functions, but again, highly unlikely. The view of manufacturers and MS is that users can’t be trusted with these tools (a valid perspective given how hard oem’s & MS have worked to dumb down users). Usually the oem recovery only consists of restoring an image of the OS as it left the factory (a limitation required by MS licensing terms).
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