Yes. The Boot.ini is still there....strange, when I try and open it from inside linux...it tells me...."can open only local files"

Hmmmm

That may have something to do with linux's ntfs support, I dunno. I know that my friend's laptop can mount the ntfs partition but niether of us are brave enough to actually mount it. He's supposed to come hang out for a bit. I'll have him bring it over if he hasn't left yet. Should he bring it over I'll see if the linux installation did anything extra to the windows partition to make it boot properly.

The mounting of a NTFS drive should have no impact on the boot sequence. You are right that you won't have any access to the files from the windows side until the drive is mounted.

Now there is Linux support for NTFS drives however it is only really safe to have read access to NTFS partitions. There are some drivers that will let you write to NTFS but you risk corrupting the NTFS partition. For file sharing between Linux and Windows make sure that you have a FAT32 partition somewhere on your system. Both Windows and Linux will be able to read/write to it.

The boot sequence with GRUB installed in the Master Boot Record (MBR) of your primary hard-drive will get activated by your PC's bios. It will present the boot menu and then depending upon your selection either and off to NTLDR which reads boot.ini from (usually) C:\ drive. If you select Linux then it hands off to /boot partition and the init scripts to start up your Linux distro.

Well,

Thanks for the info. but it still doesn't answer the question why I am not able to boot to windows....even changing to noverifyroot...I still get the "inaccessable boot device"

I can read the drive and copy from it with no problem...it is showing mounted "I think" with the green arrow in the drives area of YAST and file manager, super user mode.


Thanks

Strange... The inaccessible boot device issue only happens when you're trying to boot from a hidden partition or when your boot files got corrupted somehow. What's up with the W2K partition? Is it hidden? If not, try booting with a W2K cd and try to repair the boot files.

Yes it does appear that the Windows boot files are the issue. You might need to use your Windows CD to repair the boot sector. This will likely get Windows working but lose you Linux. Then with the Linux CD get into rescue console and re-install Grub to the MBR.

This should get you Linux back AND Windows working as well.

I did have similar problems when I had to reinstall Windows and it wiped my boot. At one point I had neither Linux nor Windows available on the PC, and no other machine to connect to Internet. Luckily I had a Linux magazine with some good instructions for Grub.

In doing reasearch...I found this, based on the error I am getting.

This is may be a very useful solution for future reference. It makes sense.......:

I have not done this yet, but it may work..


Symptom:
When attempting to boot a Windows 2000 Professional system, a blue screen error "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE" occurs.

Exact Error Message:

INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

Solution:


An INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error has been known to happen if the Backup Exec driver DRVMCDB.SYS file is removed or renamed from the system. To prevent this error, the driver DRVMCDB.SYS must be replaced in its original location ("C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS"). The file must reside in the system directory, or the machine will not boot.

In FAT16 or FAT 32:
Use a boot diskette to get to a DOS prompt, and copy the driver DRVMCDB.SYS to the "C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS" directory.

In NTFS:
The Windows 2000 Boot diskettes must be used in this scenario, as Windows 2000 NTFS security prevents file access from a simple boot disk. When prompted, choose Repair and Console. Copy the driver DRVMCDB.SYS to the "C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS" directory.

It certainly wouldn't hurt to put that original file from your installation media back into te \drivers directory, however I don't see how some partitioning, and the installation of Grub into the MBR would have had any affect upon the \drivers diretory.

The only thing I can think that might cause that is if there is something in your procedure that has modified your drive partition labelling. EG. swaping harddrive locations so that C:\ becomes D:\. Then you might have issues. There is a Grub MAP command that might get you around that, but it is usually not required.

Well, the previous did not work....the brainiac whom wrote that did not take into account that at the repair console, does not load some of the drivers that need to be loaded to "copy"..

grrrrrrrrrrr.

Light bulbs are getting pretty dim on the net on how to deal with this.............

Final option is to pull everything off the windows drive and reformat the damm thing.....thanks sooooo much novell for the screw job..

lesson learned..

I dont think its a Novell issue.

I have seen its a rather common problem with windows - typically with dual boots - If you take some size off the hard drive - Windows being Windows - wont let you boot properly - as is/was the case with you.

I any good partition manager would have helped you there - Say partition magic - you could have changed parition from ntfs to vanilla fat16 or fat32 and changed it back to ntfs again. That should have solved the problem.

Recently I too had similar problem with windows xp /Suse - I managed to fix it -

But I did get a new Hard Drive