Hi friends...
Suppie here. From INDIA. i have been using Linux for quite some time now.

I have SuSE Linux 8.2 on my machine(COMPAQ). Now i created a new partion and installed windows on it(Nno i am not switching linux to windows[just a linux newbie so could not ditch windows completely]). I installed from the Windows CD and after restarting it is not able to boot from the hard disk. The bios passes and prints "invalid partion table". Not even linux is booting.

Though i observed that if i again boot from the SuSE CD and update the linux installation, i am able to boot from hard disk(Both linux and windows).

So basically i am having to make the following steps...
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1.Booting from Windows CD.
2.Installing windows from the CD on the separate partition(all neccessary files copied).
3.Now the machine restarts and "invalid partiton table" . Even if I had formatted/deleted the Linux partion, still same result. FIXMBR didn't work.
4.Booting from SuSE CD.
5.Updating the linux.
6.Restarting.
7.A fine screen(menu.lst with all the options).
8.Booting into Windows.
9.Completing the rest of the windows installation.
10.Everything OK.
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Please tell me why this thing is happening and if there is any way out.

Hi and welcome to LQ!
Please post your question in it's aprpriate forum.
THis thread has been reported to a moderator.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Linux-General and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

It's hard to say without looking into your partition table. The fact is that the bootsector (first code run from the HD) is overwritten by Windows when it installs. That's also the place Linux bootloaders install, so you see the reason they're overwritten when installing older versions of Windows.

There's one more thing here. Boot sector and the partition table are very close to each other. Small bug in the code that overwrites the bootloader can overwrite the partition table with random data, too. That makes it unreadable. It may be your case.