whole load of partitioning problems

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Before I get into my problem, a little background, have a Dell 1520, 160GB HDD, of which 130 GB is allocated as NTFS in 2 drives, 115GB as C, and rest as E.(D is for DVD RW)

the remaining 18GB is allocated to openSUSE, with 2GB swap, and rest 16 GB as a LVM, with /boot, / and /home as the LV’sa

Now recently I “upgraded” from XP to Vista, and that has screwed by my partition table BIG time
Check the picture below
http://www.imgx.org/pthumbs/small/11657/partitioner.jpeg](http://www.imgx.org/public/view/11657)

so basically my 15GB Windows partition is “marked” as extended partition, Windows partition AND as my /boot LVM ALL at the same time. :-
as a consequence, by /boot partition doesnt get mounted, (and can’t mount manually either).
The only way to boot into openSUSE right now is to boot via openSUSE DVD, goto installation mode, choose other options and then choose Boot installed partition.
Unfortunately this doesnt mount my /home partition, and it fallsback into a bare-minimum root shell. I’ve to manually mount my /home partition, after this I can go into init 5. Even then none of the kernel modules are loaded
So after this lengthy explaination, how can I get this mess fixed ? anyway without having to reformat, repartiton etc etc?

And I have to boot using the DVD method, since the /boot partition doesnt mount AT ALL, I cannot use grub and write the bootloader
Any fixes ?

here’s an output of fdisk -l


Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0004ed56

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1          10       80293+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2   *          11       15091   121135645+   7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3           15091       17455    18991317   8e  Linux LVM
/dev/sda4           17456       19456    16073032+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5           17456       19456    16073001    7  HPFS/NTFS
2

Discussions aside on installing Vista over XP being an upgrade ;), when you tell the DVD to boot installed partition, do you point it to /boot? Or is there a boot directory in / ? Is /Windows/D operative under a windows pov or is it nuked?

If you can access the files in /boot partition and that’s the one you boot from, you could copy them to a /boot directory in / and then point the bootloader to that partition. This is basically a wild guess, warning.

3

^ heh I mentioned as “upgrade” not upgrade :wink:

Anyways, I fired up openSUSE DVD, choose Boot from installed system, it didn’t ask me where to boot from :-s
WHile /boot is directory is available, its an empty directory.
and yes under Windows the D drive is available, none of my windows partitions are nuked.

If you can access the files in /boot partition and that’s the one you boot from, you could copy them to a /boot directory in / and then point the bootloader to that partition. This is basically a wild guess, warning.

I didnt quite get this one though, since the /boot is empty I don’t know where/how to copy them.
Thanks for the reply.

4

Uhm, k, so once you boot the installed system can’t you repair/reinstall the bootloader from YaST > System > Bootloader? (You’ll probably have to manually add the Vista option, which might give problems. Check the forums as I remember that being discussed several times)

5

Sorry for the delayed response.
I tried using the repair Installed system option from the boot DVD, went to Expert repair, choose to install bootloader.

This is the error I’m getting.

http://www.imgx.org/pthumbs/small/12001/DSC00230.JPG](http://www.imgx.org/public/view/12001)