Hey,
I have installed Opensuse 11.1 on my computer with Windows 7 beta and Windows Vista. It all went down successfully. I began to mess around in Opensuse, installing programs and configuring compiz. Suddenly everything got screwed up with compiz. In my futile attempt to fix compiz, I tried to install OpenSuse from the liveCD. It began installing, failed, and then when I rebooted my computer, GRUB gets error 15 or something and thats it. I cant get to my windows OS’s or anything. I tried looking at partitions and stuff, but i dont know what is a windows partition and linux, and dont know where to go from there.
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated, because as of now the only way I can use my computer is booting into a liveCD.
If you get a green Grub screen before the error message you can attempt to boot to openSUSE by dropping to a shell prompt – but did you damage Suse severely so it just needs to be reinstalled?
OR
You can use the live CD to reinstall the Grub bootloader from the hard drive into the MBR – if openSUSE isn’t too damaged.
OR
You can restore booting to windows and when in windows you can delete the Linux partitions and then you can reinstall openSUSE into the space that created.
Hey,
I don’t get to the green screen when i boot up, soon after the power is turned on, after the BIOS, grub gets an error 14 or 15.
I’d like to go with the 2nd option, reinstalling grub from opensuse livecd.
I just downloaded the opensuse DVD if that’s any better than the liveCD
After recently installing OpenSuse alongside XP Pro, I found myself losing OpenSuse and XP, with Grub error 15.
Got XP back, but am now using OpenSuse through Sun VirtualBox.
Much less hassle, and no worries of affecting my other programs!
You can use either a live CD or the install DVD. Here’s how, from a tutorial I’m currently drafting:
Reinstall Grub from a Linux Live CD or from the openSUSE Install DVD in “Rescue System” mode:
If the low level booting has broken down but the installation in /boot/grub on the hard drive is intact, then you can boot your computer to Linux using any of a multitude of Live CDs; from there you can reinstall Grub to the MBR, linked to the existing menu.lst in openSUSE and then reboot to the installed version of openSUSE on the hard drive. This method works using e.g. Knoppix, openSUSE Live CDs, SystemRescueCD, SuperGrubDisk, and many more. You can also boot the openSUSE install DVD and select the “Rescue System” option and start from there.
If you have the openSUSE install DVD, boot from it and on the first menu of options select the Rescue System option. That will start an elementary Linux Live operating system and bring you to the login prompt. Enter the username root and you will get the command prompt. If on the other hand you have a Linux Live CD, boot from it and log in. Then open a cosole window and enter su to get rootly powers. Whichever way you started (the openSUSE install DVD or a Linux Live CD) when you are at the root command prompt, first you find the partition containing openSUSE’s bootloader. Then you reinstall Grub with a pointer to that partition.
First find the openSUSE installation:
You enter this ---------------- grub
Computer returns like this ---- grub>
You enter this ---------------- find /boot/grub/menu.lst
Computer returns like this ---- (hd1,6)
Here, (hd1,6) is Grub’s pointer to my openSUSE installation on drive number 2, partition number 7. Your pointer will be different from my example (hd1,6). Substitute your correct values for my example (hd1,6). Now that you have your pointer, proceed like this:
You enter this ---------------- root(hd1,6)
Computer returns like this ---- Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
You enter this ---------------- setup (hd0)
You see 4-5 lines like this — Checking if /boot/grub/stage1 exists … yes
Computer finally returns this-- Succeeded…Done
You enter this ---------------- quit
You enter this ---------------- reboot
The computer should reboot and present you with the Grub boot menu from which you can booot into openSUSE
This won’t hurt but it could help – it all depends what damage was done to the openSUSE root partition when you started the re-installation.
If it doesn’t work then I suggest you reinstall openSUSE after clearing the drive and tidying it so windows boots a la option three.
Ok I booted into the Rescue system, and logged in as root, did the steps up to “find /boot/grub/menu.lst” and it returned “error 15: file not found”. But when I check the partition editor in the DVD repair installer, it shows there are tons of partitions there, so I know my computer isn’t erased. when I try to reinstall from that or anything, its always “unable to mount” or something.
What do I do?
Also, I tried to use some of the expert tools in Repair mode, but they gave me errors saying there was no root partition. I opened the partition editor and got this:
dev/sda1 12.13GB HPFS/NTFS
dev/sda2 137.71GB HPFS/NTFS
dev/sda3 148.74BG Extended
dev/sda5 2.01GB Linux Swap
dev/sda6 75.33GB HPFS/NTFS
dev/sda7 20.00GB Linux Native ext3
dev/sda8 50.90GB Linux Native ext3
BTW where did sda6, the extra NTFS, come from? Curious.
Well, after looking at the list of partitions I’d reinstall openSUSE using the installer DVD and use the expert mode in the partitioning section of the installer and force it to use sda5 for swap, sda7 for root and sda8 for home. Make sure to set all of those three for a format to get rid of the old stuff.
