Hello all. I had a problem before (Computer freezing: Trying to find the source of the problems.) that I have solved so far by buying a new hard drive and reinstalling windows and openSuSE 11.3. It took me some time to get it right but I’ve done it now. However, I did something (not sure what; there are a lot of possible reasons) to the old hard drive that made it unbootable. As evidenced by the post above the drive wasn’t working well, but it was working and I wanted to be able to still use it in order to prepare a switchover of all my files. But grub seems to be gone. It doesn’t boot even though I can still access the files on it when it’s in a hard drive enclosure. I haven’t erased anything from it.
I would like to try to put grub back on it and boot from it again. What’s the best way to do this? I could stick the drive it back in the computer and work from there (perhaps with the live disk I have) or can I fix the problem while it’s in the hard drive enclosure? I imagine if I search I’ll find instructions on reinstalling grub. I know you have to do it after reinstalling windows on a dual boot machine. But can I do it with yast while booting from the new hard disk and is there anything I should know before I try this? The drive has Windows 7 and openSuSe 11.3 on it. Thanks.
Thanks for all the replies. I’m still working on this. I’ve got myself a new job and now have more money but less time. It’s a good change but it means I don’t have the time I use to have to explore Linux. In the spirit of saving time I decided to try to see if reinstalling openSUSE would solve the problem with the older disk I was trying to fix. It did, until I decided to reboot. The bootloader was there but it didn’t work. The background to bootloader menu was missing also. Using a live disk to see what I could fix it didn’t work either. It told me I was it was unable to fix it due to partitioning. I don’t believe that but I don’t have the time to explore it now. So needing to do some work I put my new drive back into the computer and then attempted to boot up. It didn’t work. No bootloader or nothing. I booted back up with a live dvd (handy things them) and was in the middle of a lengthy reply to this thread complaining about my problems when I realized I had struggled so long to get the drive back into the computer (it sticks and doesn’t want to slide in) that I had forgotten to hook up the data and power cables. D’oh! No wonder it wouldn’t boot. I fixed that and it works. Well, mostly but that’s another thread about not being able to reach the repositories for some reason. Thanks again.
To answer your questions: Yes, I’ve got a new hard drive and it’s up an running. The old drive was in an enclosure that was on and attached to the computer when I was installing. Probably a mistake. Actually this would explain why I had two windows installations when I went into grub the first time. I think I said to myself “that’s wrong” and deleted the one I didn’t recognize. I think the flakyness of the older drive had more to do with software than hardware. I did check it. And I’m going to fix this problem. Just not tonight. Thanks.