I have just installed Suse 9.0 alongside a running Win 2000 system. The Win system is on its own IDE harddisk, while Suse is on an SCSI harddisk which in turn is on an Adaptec 2940 AHA UW.

During install Suse hang after its first reboot attempt. I retried several times but it always hang at the precise same moment when it tried to run Yast. However, I could boot from the Suse DVD and continue the setup process, so Suse is now running.

The problem is: when Suse tried to install Grub on the Win disk, it messed it up so that the hd was no longer bootable, giving only a 'Grub harddisk error' response. So I booted into Linux with the DVD again (which is not a convenient option as it takes much longer than a normal boot) and tried Lilo; this gave me a number of lines of '01' repeated.

I fixed the Win MBR with fixmbr.com, and tried installing Grub and Lilo (subsequently) on a floppy bootdisk, with the exact same results.

Then I tried booting from SCSI, and this only gives me the word Grub, then hangs.

So while I can boot into Windows normally, there is no way to boot into Linux except with the DVD, which is extremely tedious. Does anyone have any suggestions what else I should try?

Robin

I think that your problem is that neither grub or lilo will handle the initial read on your SCSI hard disk. Once you get past the initial read everything seems to work fine. I suggest that you set up a small partition on the IDE drive and place /boot there. Maybe lilo or grub can then get past the initial read problem.

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
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Steve Stites

I think that repartitioning the IDE drive is out of the question as the Win 2000 system there is too much hassle to re-create. I don't have Partition Magic or anything like that and before I buy that I can always buy another IDE harddisk.

But what does the SCSI drive have to do with installing the boot loader on a floppy? I would understand if the boot loader showed then failed to boot from the SCSI drive, but it fails even to show up in the first place.

Robin

"But what does the SCSI drive have to do with installing the boot loader on a floppy? I would understand if the boot loader showed then failed to boot from the SCSI drive, but it fails even to show up in the first place."

You are right. You should get at least LI from the boot floppy LILO. Maybe the problem is in the boot floppy configuration. Here is a working lilo.conf for floppy which you can check your lilo.conf against. I don't have one for a grub boot floppy.

# bootdisk LILO configuration file
boot=/dev/fd0
install=/mnt/floppy/boot.b
map=/mnt/floppy/System.map-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl
vga = 771
lba32

# Linux bootable partition config begins
image = /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl
vga = 771
initrd = /boot/initrd-2.4.22-1.2115.nptl.img
root = /dev/hda3
label = Fedora
append="hdd=ide-scsi"
___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

I managed to make a bootable floppy with Lilo now, apparently the Yast module for making bootloaders had a standard setting not to activate the Linux partition; when I changed that I managed to write a working Lilo to the floppy. Now I can boot into Linux from the floppy, and that is good enough for the moment.

Thanks for your help!

Robin