After Installing Suse 10.3, no more access to Windows XP
 

I have a new HP 530 Notebook on which I installed XP, which worked fine.
I need XP for certain applications.

Now I just installed Suse 10.3. which also works fine.

But when restarting, the bootmanager asks as usual what to boot. Unlike the other computer, where I had Windows 98 and Suse 10.1 and it asked if it should start Suse or Windows, this one asks me to choose between Suse, windows 1, windows 2 and Suse safe version....
Suse starts fine. Windows 2 does nothing, windows 1 telle me NTLDR is missing...

I can no longer acces XP... which is not very good, I am afraid...

Can anybody help?

Thanks, Upageya

Do you have Windows installation cd?

Playing guessing games, it looks like your hard disk(s) has(ve) two partitions identified by Suse as Windows drives but the menu set up doesn't seem to be handling them correctly.

What does your grub menu look like?

As your first install was XP, I'd expect it has installed itself in the first partition of your first drive.
If so, you want to have a menu entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst (or possibly /boot/grub/menu.conf) that looks like:

(You need to be root before you can edit the menu)

"title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1"

Check and change (if necessary) your menu.lst before doing anything horrible with the XP install CD as all that can do is re-establish your XP boot but at the price of losing your access (for the time being)to Linux

John

If, having taken the advice above, having posted menu.lst here, and having tried changing menu.lst you decide to restore the XP MBR it is worth knowing that there is another way of dual booting using the windows boot.ini

Boot.ini
 

I've long been aware of the existence of dual boot possibilities using boot.ini but in my simple minded way have always assumed that it could only be used for variations on MS systems.

Please tell me more on structuring it to boot Linux. (but I don't currently plan to replace Grub which works fine!)

ta, John

Boot.ini
 

arubin - this is interesting!

I've long been aware of the existence of dual boot possibilities using boot.ini but in my simple minded way have always assumed that it could only be used for variations on MS systems.

Please tell me more on structuring it to boot Linux. (but I don't currently plan to replace Grub which works fine!)

ta, John

You install Grub or lilo to the root partition of your linux distro. Suppose it is sda2

You then run

dd if=/dev/sda2 of=bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1

Copy bootsect.lnx to a flashdrive. Boot windows, bootsect.lnx to c:\ and add
C:\bootsect.lnx="Linux" to c:\boot.ini

Just for the sake of the argument,no matter what OP does within Linux will not make Windows to boot again.It has to be done with Windows cd/dvd.The key word here is NTLDR.

As (I think) alan_ri says the boot.ini technique uses the windows bootloader so you would of course have to restore it before using the this technique.

I do not think there is much point to it if you already have grub working to your satisfaction but if you have a pristine Windows PC and you want to dual boot without touching the MBR this is the way to do it.