I installed dual boot on three of my windows machines successfully. I tried installing opensuse on my vista laptop and i had errors and now I cant get access to any OS. I get a boot error telling me there is no OS. Unfortunately this is the one machine that I have a critical windows application that doesn't run under wine so I cant just discard windows yet.

I installed a live disc and found that both the os's are there under different partitions as expected so the files seem to be there but grub is not coming up or something. sorry there are to many things I still don't know about Linux yet so I hope I have given enough basic info to get the process going.

For now I just want to get windows running again so I can use my one hold out application. later this month I am going to an install party and I can get further help there but for now I need to have windows up again!

Oh, the other bad thing is that I cant just wipe the drive and re-install because the windows install disc is actually on a partition on the laptop.

Well, at least I am progressing towards Linux on most the rest of the family computers.

SOLUTION:
Thanks for the info responses below. I was finally able to fdisk the mbr and that did the trick.

Do you have a nice dos boot disk? or win98, or even better hiren's bootdisk.

Any will do. get to a c:\>
and type fdisk /mbr

that will restore your mbr (master boot record) a usuall hiding place for grub.

That should allow you to boot off your first HD.

Maybe you need...

This might help you if you do not have a Vista installation DVD or have not made a recovery backup. This will restore your Vista MBR.

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/window...disc-download/