Suse Bootloader not installing

Hi Guys,

Well Windoze did it to me again. I was installing Norton Save and Restore on Vista and did a reboot. For some reason the MBR was erased and i couldnt get into either Opensuse 11.0 or Vista. I did the Vista fix MBR thing via the DVD and i got into Vista. Then i did the OpenSuse fix MBR thing.

The odd thing is Opensuse doesnt detect the Vista partition when i do the automatic recovery from the DVD. When i try to reload the MBR, it says it fixes it but when i reboot, it doesnt work. It just goes right into Vista again.

Any ideas?

I haven’t seen the fix MBR thing in Suse – can you elaborate, I’m interested?

In the meantime – get yourself back into Suse and do this:

…go to Yast –> System –> Boot Loader. The Grub configuration screen comes up with the Tab “Section Management” activated. In the lower right is a drop-down selector labelled “Other”. Select from “Other” the option “Propose New Configuration” and then wait for Grub to analyse your partitions and display a new configuration. This may take a while. Important: When that finishes, activate the tab labelled “Boot Loader Installation” and select to “Boot from the Master Boot Record”. [Yast will often default to booting from the root or boot partition rather than from the MBR but that’s for experts only – always choose the MBR.] Then click Finish to save the changes and install the reconfigured Grub into the hard drive’s MBR. If you get a message that "The bootloader boot sector will be written to a floppy disk … don’t bother with the floppy – just click OK to proceed and install to the MBR. Reboot and you should be able to boot to openSUSE and windows.

Sometimes there’s an extra tweak to get windows in tune, but that’s simple and wait to see.

PS: FFI on the quoted segment: GRUB Boot Multiboot openSUSE Windows (2000, XP, Vista) using the Grub bootloader.