My friend has a Toshiba Satellit Pro M15-S405 - Here's the issue, and I can't find a way around it.. HELP!!!
He has a USB external Hard Drive, on which he wanted to install SuSe 8.2
So.. he did just that. Here the problem arises. The laptop comes with WinXP on it (not sure if this is the issue or not) and once he installed SuSe8.2 (it saw and installed onto his USB drive without a hitch) it apparantly trashed the MBR??
Whenever he tries to boot normally, he gets the following message:
LIL00000000000000000000 ("something like that")
And neither GRUB or LILO will work. I had him re-run the install and try Lilo rather than GRUB.. same thing.. it won't boot past the error message. - basically, we've got no bootloader.
Now then, for S&G if he boots via the SuSe 8.2 CD 1, it will say that linux is already installed and of course gives you the option to go ahead and boot it. Works flawlessly... SuSe boots on into the GUI and everything... aside from the softmodem everything has been auto-detected, works like a charm. The windows partition is still intact and can be mounted and accessed, we just can't get to it at boot time to boot it anymore.
SOOOOoooo.. can anyone explain to me what the trouble is with the MBR / boot loader, and what I could do to fix this for him? I'm stumped. (Albeit I am rather low on the knowledge totem-pole for linux. Been running 7.3 then 8.0 for years now, love it, but still not that well versed)
Thanks all and take care,
John