I'm stumped. Maybe somebody can help me here.

My machine contains two maxtor hard disks -- one has Suse 9.0 on it, and the other contains Windows XP. I've been running Suse for months now, with no major problems, and I just added the second disk with XP the other day.

Linux disk is the primary master, XP is the primary slave, and I have a CD-Rom as the secondary master. Linux sees the following: hda1 = linux swap, hda2 = linux root, hdb = windows, hdc = cd-rom

When I turn on the machine, it automatically boots into windows. I have an asus a7n8x motherboard, and I set the bios to load in this order: cd-rom, hd1 (linux), hd2 (windows). No matter how I change the order of the hard disks, the thing always boots into windows.

The only way I can get it to boot into linux is to boot with the suse install cd in the drive -- the CD loads its boot loader (not sure if it's lilo or grub -- doesn't really matter), and I select "boot from hard disk". Doing so loads causes the machine to boot from the linux drive, which brings up the HD bootloader. This bootloader (lilo) doesn't work right now, but I don't even care. I figure I can figure out the boot loader problem, but first I have to teach my bios to boot to the linux disk rather than the windows disk, or else the boot loader never even has a chance to run.

Any help would be much appreciated!

best,
Zach

Those tricky boys over at MS have taken over you MBR (master boot record). This is the first sector of your first hard drive that holds your systems booting information. What you can do to fix this is, if you have a suse boot disk, boot into suse with a floppy or even the Install CD1 as rescue and re-install Lilo to your MBR. Windows overwrote whatever was in your MBR (LILO) when installing and thats why your system boots directly into Windows.

rberry88

I didn't think windows would stop me from setting up my puter the way I wanted it to work for me -- WTF was I thinking??!?!?!

Thanks a lot for your help.

best,
Zach

Are you sure this is right? Like I said, I can still boot into linux under some circumstances -- and it brings up lilo. I don't think the MBR has been over-written.

Zach