Hi everyone. I recently installed 11.3 on an external drive. After adding some software in yast (searched KERNEL and checked every option), I was prompted to reboot but the no boot sector found error came up. Tried reinstalling with the same result. Can someone please help? Thank you.

Grub is boot loader

Possibly a dumb question, but are you sure you installed grub? And if you did, is it installed on the external drive or your internal drive? And which drive are you booting from?

yes very sure that it is the grub loader. I configured it to boot from the external drive by changing the /boot/grub/menu.lst and /boot/grub/device.map files in order to get it to work in the first place (long battle). Grub is installed on external and booting from external.

I have tried using rescue but it doesn't fly.

grub
root (hd0,0)
it says unrecognized filesystem

This tells me that grub is looking at the first partition of the internal drive for a bootable filesystem. To sort this out, please show the output of "fdisk -l" (run it as root in a terminal).

Also, run this command: grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
and show the output here.

That will show the location(s) of grub stage 1, and will also give the information needed to correct your grub config to find grub on the external drive.

hi bigrigdriver, I had already run the command find /boot/grub/stage1 and the output was (hd1,0) so I did

grub
root (hd1,0)
setup (hd0)

and blew out my windows mbr
that's when i tried

grub
root (hd0,0)
it says unrecognized filesystem

I am going to do the fdisk -l now

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 40GB 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/tracks, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes/512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes/512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x14e5e100

Device Boot Start End Blocks ID System
/dev/sda1 * 1 4864 39070048+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2GB 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/tracks, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes/512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes/512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x09cd09cc

Device Boot Start End Blocks ID System
/dev/sdb1 1 2611 20971520 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 2611 2873 2097152 82 Linux swap/ Solaris
/dev/sdb3 2873 15926 104855552 83 Linux
/dev/sdb4 15926 22454 52428800 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)


find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd1,0)

As you have learned, that was a mistake. You should have given the command: setup (hd1) to write the first stage of grub and the partition table to the MBR of the external drive. Thereafter, when booting with the external drive plugged in, it should boot Suse (assuming your BIOS polls USB before the internal drive looking for a bootable OS).

If you haven't done so yet, you can restore the MBR of the internal drive using a windows install disk (even win 98 would work). You will have to do some research on restoring the windows MBR. I haven't used windows in years, and the procedure has changed since win98.

1 members found this post helpful.

Good news is I was able to recover mbr, not so good news is I tried the command
setup (hd1) and still get error message [no boot sector found on disk] :-(
I have my bios setup for the external to boot first and I also configured /boot/grub/menu.lst and /boot/grub/device.map when I first installed suse. Before I made my first post I tried to reinstall when I first got the error message; but after the installation got to the reboot part, the message was back. I am not quite sure where to go from here.

Bigrigdriver I would like to thank you very much for your help.

After I tried the above I ran the dvd and selected the updates option without actually selecting any. I stopped and restarted the reboot but the system did the quick reboot and voila!