VistaHome/Suse11 to VistaBusiness/Suse11

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Okey dokey,

I screwed this one up. But I am not going to take all the blame. Anyhow…

I had a system with Vista Home, on which I shrank the main partition down with the new nifty feature in Vista for doing such things. I got Suse11 up and running dual-boot just fine. I even compiled a kernel for the install. No worries.

But then…I upgraded the Vista to Business edition, and I lost the grub boot menu at system boot.

My system has one of those nasty EISA 1.4Gb partitions on dev/sda1, but I never gave it any mind. I should nuke it in Linux once I can get back in.

I booted from the Live CD, and went into the bootloader YaST menu, but got a message that due to partition setup the bootloader can’t be installed. I KNOW that all the Linux partitions are still intact, but am wholly at a loss as to what to do now.

Help?

Thanks :slight_smile:

2

You could look at this as an option
Download EasyBCD 1.7.2 - An advanced GUI application that makes it easy to modify the Windows Vista bootloader and the entries in it - Softpedia

3

First, if may be a very bad idea to touch that first partition. I won’t bore you with all the technical details - suffice it to say that Vista has different partitioning rules and can be mighty unfriendly when certain things are changed (even by other versions of Windows).

You won’t be able to reinstall the SuSE grub boot loader with YaST in the Live-CD. But you can do it from the terminal command line, and in this case, that is the better option because you have granular control and visibility of the result. So if you want to do this, first boot the Live-CD, open a terminal window, switch to root, and do:

fdisk -lu

So we can see the partition table. The I can give you the precise commands to use to reinstall grub.

By the way, there is a very good alternative, having Vista boot openSUSE instead. There is a easy to use and quite popular little Vista boot management tool called EasyBCD; it’s here EasyBCD 1.7.2 - NeoSmart Technologies. With this method, you install grub to the openSUSE root partition boot sector instead of the MBR, and Vista loads grub from there for you. If you should want to go this route, let us know and we’ll give you the instructions to install grub to the boot sector instead of the MBR. Either way, we still need to see the table from the fdisk command above.

EDIT: Oops, I see @caf4926 has just posted before me. Again, whether you go with grub in the MBR or using EasyBCD, you still will need to reinstall grub from the command line using the Live-CD. Easy to do, once we see the table.