Ive got a Toshiba portege M200, and it had Xp tablet edition, on an 80gb harddrive so I resized the xp partition, and then used a nice program which allowed me to install grub from xp, which then loaded a suse install program, and then downloaded all the packages from the internet and installed fine.

When the installation got to installing and configuring grub, it said that there was an error and that it couldnt install. So I had to skip that section and carry on. So then I went back into the XP and tried to find a program to install grub from windows, i managed to find a couple, not quite sure what I did but it installed grub, and when I restarted I could only get to the grub command line.

I managed to boot the XP partition with
but when i tried to boot linux using:
i got an error about the root device not exsisting or something, i tried for quite a while doing different things and searching for soultions, but couldnt find anything so i decided to take out the hard drive from the laptop and connect it to my computer via usb cable.

What im wondering now is how would I go about installing grub from my current system? im still a bit of a noob at using linux so im not quite sure what i need to do.

Thanks in advance. Mat

When you install GRUB, you have to specify where it will find it's files (GRUB stage 1 gets hard-coded to point to the location). Thus--if you installed GRUB using Windows, how would you / did you establish this?

The reason it goes to a grub prompt is that it cannot find it's files.

In your second entry, you are mixing the commands for installing grub (setup) with the commands for booting.

Do you know what is on all the partitions?--For example, how did you determine that Linux was on hda5?

Finally, if hda5 is correct (and that is also where /boot is), then the root command would have to be "root (hd0,3)" (Remember that grub counts from zero)

The general form to boot from the grub prompt is:
root (hdX,Y) points grub to the location of /boot
kernel <path/>vmlinuz root=/dev/hdVW (here root is telling the kernel where to mount the filesystem (/) )
initrd <path/>initrd (If used)
boot

Suppose linux / and /boot are both on hda5, the commands would then be:
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5
initrd....similar
boot


This may be of some help, also

ah that was probably the problem I was having,and it'd be quite simple to fix that if I hadn't already broken it some more. So if I had changed root to (hd0,4) it would have worked?

Ive now took the hard drive out, and im going to reinstall openSuse 10.2 onto this harddrive and install grub again, and hopefully it will work. But I tried to repair grub using the repair options in the installer, and it just said error try again? and however I configured the bootloader, it wouldnt be installed. So i dont know if its a problem with the drive or with windows been at the start of the drive?

I might just backup the xp partition and then format the drive, install linux on it, and plot xp at the end. But im not sure what tool to use to back up the partition? Cheers for your help

If that's where the Linux /boot directory is (was).

Not sure whay you are removing the drive in order to re-install Linux....

The cleanest way to proceed is to re-install XP--keeping the disk unpartitioned except for a 10-15GB Windows partition at the beginning. Then install Linux and grub.

To copy a partition, you can use dd

with no cd drive or floppy, this thing has been driving me pretty crazy. Ive been spending ages trying to get linux on it.

The problem has now chaned to that ive got

hd0,0 SWAP
hd0,1 /
hd0,2 /home
hd0,3 windows

and grub is now working nicely on the computer, however because I took the harddrive out and plugged it into my computer via a usb connector, the hard drives are not assigned the same names (on my computer it was assigned /dev/sdd1 - sdd4 ) now im not sure what the laptop would mount the harddrive as, so grub is passing the arguement to the kernel to look for root in a place that doenst exsist, and I end up in a minimalistic bash shell thing. and I have no idea how to work out what names i need to change.

I can take out the harddrive and simply change the grub settings so that it passed the right place to the kernel, but im not sure what they would be?

Sorry to keep coming back with more problems, but I felt ive learnt a great deal about linux and grub

i gave up trying to put linux on this way, and I have just given in and shelled out money for the special toshiba cd/dvd drive so that i can boot from cd.