I'm having trouble with grub boot loader, when I change it in yast it appears to switch to windows boot loader and locks me out of suse. If that isn't bad enough when I use the cd to rescue grub it ask's me for a user name and password. I enter them the exact same way I would if I were logging in normally to suse and get the error "login incorrect"

I've tried configuring the boot loader in yast two different ways, moving "windows" up to the top line in the order I want the boot menu to appear and leaving that alone and just selecting "windows" as default.

Both ways it appears to boot from the windows boot loader (no grub menu) which would be great if I had an easy way to switch it back (run suse and switch it back) when I needed.

Robert Christ

Just trying to get a picture of your process:

You are dual booting windows (7? XP?)
You are using your original suse 12.1 cd to rescue grub .. .
You boot from the disk, it gives you a list of options; Install new system, Rescue existing system etc...
You choose "Rescue", it prompts you for a username and password -- you provide those associated with your:

user account? or root ?

And can't log in.

A couple of things stand out:

It may be that the username and password your cd expects are some kind of default password ie; "admin" + "password"
or "blank" + "blank" or something other than your actual credentials.

The windows boot loader (at least last I was dual booting) will not boot (or even detect) a linux system.
You must have Grub (or lilo) installed as the boot loader (something to do with the MBR?)

If you want to change the order that OS's are listed in GRUB the easiest way to do this is by editing a file called menu.lst
I'd recommend reading up on menu.lst entries and setting up grub.

I'm unfamilliar with yast, I know it is the suse equivalent to synaptic on debian, perhaps a suse user can guide you there.
By doing this you may be disabling grub, and setting the windows boot loader in its place.

good luck

Yes

This is what is weird, when I log in after I re installed, (it defaults to log in automatically but I turned this option on "log in" so I could see) I used my "user account name" (which it put in the blank automatically) but my "root" password (which is the only password I have). So that is the first thing I tried when I ran the rescue utility (a second time) and couldn't get access to the utility. So I still haven't solved this riddle. Didn't try admin but tried just about every other combination I could think of.

When I changed the order so windows was on the top of the grub menu list it defaulted to windows and didn't even give me the option to even load suse. (grub menu simply didn't appear) After I re-installed suse I backed up the boot directory and imaged the partition (/sda6) with suse on it, than I went into yast ran boot loader and switched the default from suse to windows and still got my grub menu on boot so everything is good now. I thought I tried that also and it locked me out but apparently not.
I've done that in the past but it was time consuming and I forgot everything I learned. I should probably give up windows and switch to linux full time than I wouldn't forget everything I learn because I'd be using it often enough.

I think that's what happend, I didn't even have a grub menu to choose from.
Anyways I think I solved the boot loader problem, "don't change the order" the options appear in the menu or list, just change which one you have selected as "default" and that one will be the one that boots automatically.

Thanks for the reply
Robert Christ

on the live cd to get to root the username is "root" and there is no password. It wont be your username and password because its not actually booting up your system.

you may also want to try sudo if su isn’t working.

And yes, if you don’t have the grub menu its disabled.

1 members found this post helpful.

I think it had a prompt called "rescue login" And a prompt called "password". I assumed for some rudimentary Interface like safemode in windows. (Where I was hoping to find a utility to restore grub) Just for the heck of it I tried your suggestion for typing "root" And when I did this it didn't even ask for a password it just went straight to a terminal with full privileges.

Robert Christ