I have triple booted Windows XP (195 GB)partition 0? the second partition is Windows 7 (195 GB)And the rest of a 1TB hard drive went to Open Suse 11.3.
if it makes any difference I used g parted to create the three partitions and made them all primary.
My problem is I want to change the way they all get along.
When I boot up, I get the options; Desktop -- openSUSE 11.3-2.6.34-12
Failsafe -- openSUSE 11.3-2.6.34-12
windows 1
windows 2
which is fine, but clicking on windows 1 takes me to the windows boot loader with the options of windows 7, or previous version of windows.
clicking on windows 2 brings up a screen telling me " rootnoverify (hd0,1) chainloader +1 BOOTMGR is missing press ctrl+alt+del to restart"

I would like the end result to be windows 1=XP,windows 2=7, then I can rename them accordingly.
one more thing, when I installed openSUSE, I let it automatically configure the hard drive and create the necessary partitions(it deleted partition 3 first). i remember it saying somewhere that the boot manager was past the 125 GB limit, and might not boot.
I appreciate any and all help and would preferably fix this before i add a lot of programs, then end up wiping the hard drive and starting from a different position.

To address the question in your subject line first: You can't incorporate the win bootldr into grub. The folks at microsoft don't seem to be inclined to program their OS to cooporate with other OSs, so don't look for that anytime soon. The best you can hope for is to either configure the win bootldr to boot the two windows installations, and pass off the boot process to your Opensuse installation's bootloader. Or, configure grub to boot Opensuse or pass of the boot process to the win bootldr to boot either winxp or win7.

Some information from you would be helpful. Boot Opensuse, then copy the menu entries from /boot/grub/menu.lst (or possibly grub.conf if the recent Opensuse release is using grub2). You will have to be root to access that file. If you are use KDE environment, it's as easy as "kdesu kate /boot/grub/menu.lst", or any text editor of your choosing, then supply the root password when prompted.

Then you can edit the windows1 and windows2 lines to your liking, as well as copy the menu entries to post here.

Without that information I can't help you any further. Though it sounds like you may need to edit the windows entries to dupe windows into booting. Windows wants to be the only OS, or the very least, the OS in the first partition on the drive. A bit or remaping partition locations (you can read more about it in grub documentation) usually does the trick to get windows booting from partitions other than the first one.

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Thank you bigrigdriver, I was afraid that would be the case since I could not find anything similar via Google. not that it matters(since I see the matter as solved), but ya I assume its grub2 since there is a splash screen.and yes its kde. Ive dual booted before and am not very familiar with the terminal as of yet but have managed to make adjustments to the boot loader through the GUI.

every thing boots up OK, i just prefer to do everything through one screen (preferably grub)in stead of having a sub menu of sorts.once again, thank you.

OK, I figured that this was solved, but as I was searching for how to adjust the timer in the windows boot manager, I saw an ad for some software that will let you boot up 100+ operating systems.although they wanted $49.95, I was wondering if there was a similar product in open source that allowed at least three operating systems?
If not, then perhaps there is a way to read and edit the MBR, so at least I can see what is going on each time I add an operating system.There must be a way,perhaps it is so small, no one messed with it yet,but it's really bugging me.
I just woke up,and wanted to get this posted, as I know it may be awhile if at all, for a response. guess I better start doing some research.

The problem is not grub, but the Windows loader design. When you install a later version (Win7 after XP in your case), the loader code in the XP partition is replaced with the Win7 version, and the boot.ini adjusted accordingly.
There is only one copy of the Windows loader code. Live with it.

This can be got around by selectively hiding the Windows partitions during the installs, but gets a bit messy. More so after the fact.

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Hello olkirf,

I'd suggest to edit the file "boot.ini" of the windows-installation where the windowsbootloader is installed. Please google for boot.ini.

Markus

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Thank you syg00 and markush, I will look further into editing the boot.ini file, but am also curious about multi booting. I was just reading in a knowledge base, that seemed a little dated, since neither vista or 7 were mentioned, about making a small fat 16 partition under 1023 MB,in the beginning of the hard drive where all the operating systems could boot from. does this still hold true for windows 7, since it doesn't use dos?
um, I've seem to strayed from my original topic. I guess since a merging of the boot loaders isnt going to happen, this (for now)is solved.

Well, what I mean is to look at one of the M$ sites, for example: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022/en-us
You will find many informations about dualbooting of windows/windows and I think there you will find a way to prevent the windows-bootloader from booting multiple windowsversions. Grub can manage the booting of multiple windows-installations as well as multiple linux distributions.

Markus