My laptop cannot read my hard-drive now after attempting to install opensuse 12.1 into one of my extended partitions.
I have an HP G72, and saw an alert that I was installing a bootloader beyond the 128gb point on the drive that could cause problems. I enabled both boot install options, install on the mbr and install on drive’s “/” directory.
I’m not sure what happened, but I would now like to boot into a livecd, attach the hard drive as an external drive and undo all of the changes the installer made to the boot sectors, replacing them with either blank or simple generic bootloaders.
Can someone explain what changes I would have to make to do this?
If you did get a LiveCD, you could run the fdisk -l command in terminal so we can see what you have:
su -
password:
fdisk -l
The fdisk command needs to be ran as root, but the password is not requested when you already have root authority. Normally you install the Grub boot loader into the MBR or into the root / partition, but not both. Give us a fdisk -l command so we can see what you got.
Apart from your problem, it is very unlikely that that 128GB warning is valid in your case. It is only a problem for old BIOSes. This warniing should not distract you from your problem.
I can see that the Extended Partition is marked active for booting. It is possible to load the Grub Boot loader into the Extended Partition and mark it active, but your must NEVER run the Windows Partition program as it does not understand this setup and will likely make it unusable. I suggest you install openSUSE again. You can reuse the three partitions you created OR delete them and start over. Make sure to place the Grub boot loader into the MBR this time and you should be OK. DO not let openSUSE do anything to your Windows partitions, nothing more. If you can not figure it out, come back and ask specific questions and take lots of notes. If you can imagine you can select custom partitioning. The SWAP partition will be mounted automatically. You elect to reuse, mount and format the old root / partition. You can do the same for the /home partition or you can just mount it. Make sure in the main install screen, Grub is said to be installed into the MBR. Make sure no changes are being made to the two NTFS partitions and the second one is Windows while the first is the Windows boot partition. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Thanks for the help. I have a linux partition of a different distro and using a live cd, I was able to connect the drive as an external usb, chmod in, run grub-install and everything was fine after that. Just a fluke that if the boot manager is installed in exactly the wrong way, it completely throws off the hp laptop bios, much worse than if there had been no hd at all.