Win10 Dual Boot problem

Search for ‘dual boot’ in FAQ produced nothing, though I know there are some.

I was running a dual boot system, Win8 on disc0 and SUSE (ancient 11.x which did what I wanted quite happily) on disc1.

Having now changed to Win10 (which works) when going to SUSE I get put into Emergency Mode as mounting the Windows-C disc fails.
This means I cannot access my files on SUSE.

I presume this is a problem with Win10 boot locking out Grub somehow. Has it overwritten something?
I would prefer to just get to Old SUSE, but if necessary could I install a more modern version and still access the old files (yes they are backed up, but that is always a pain).

TIA
TheSGC

SUSE (ancient 11.x

Please specify more precise.

I this some openSUSE 11.x or a SUSE Enterprise (SLES/SLED) 11 with a service pack. You should know what you have, we can not quess that.

When you realy forgot, you can try

cat /etc/os-release

or when that fails

cat /etc/SuSE-release

Make sure your Windows 10 shuts down in full ( which it doesn’t by default, hence the refusal to mount them ). Don’t ask me how to do this on Windows, I just know it’s an issue with Windows 10

And, 11.x is far too old, it doesn’t receive any (security) updates anymore and might be vulnerable. Perform a clean install of Leap 42.1. My 2 cents.

Most likely is that you have Windows Fast Boot turned on this leave the Windows partitions in a dirty state and Linux can not mount them. Be sure it is turned off.

Not that is critically important when asking for help to giver the true complete versions since in many cases that is very important information.

No, grub worked just fine. You got into SUSE. Otherwise you would be stuck at booting, instead of in emergency mode.

I don’t really know what happened. So I’ll guess. The windows 10 install renumbered your partitions so that some of the “fstab” information is wrong. It is also possible that one of your linux partitions is no longer in the partition table.

I have seen reports of both of these happening. Apparently, Windows 10 install sometimes needs one more partition that was there previously. So it puts one there and changes the numbering. And if it requires another primary partition and you are already using all 4 primary partition, it will delete the partition table entry for one of the existing partitions (but I don’t think it touches the data).

Rereading the OP, I see that linux is on a separate disk.

It’s possible that renumbering partitions on the Windows disk has caused the problem. I suggest you boot with live media, mount your root partition, and comment out and “fstab” entry that mounts a Windows partition. If it boots that way, then you can later fix those fstab entries.

Thanks! That has fixed it.

Thanks to everyone else too.

Yes, my SuSE is old, I was using it only for limited applications, in fact I was more modern than I thought:- I have 12.1 Asparagus!

I’ll schedule a new installation.

Thanks again for everyone’s help.

TheSGC/.