I'm a newb to linux so I figured I'd post here. I've searched throught he forums extensively and haven't been able to figure out how to solve my problems. I've been messing around with the boot loader and have probably made things worse. This is what I've done:

I have two harddrives. This first is 750 gigs and it has vista installed on it. Today, I hooked another harddrive up to my computer (80 gigs) and installed suse 11 kde on it. I was hoping that booting up to one or the other would be easy. However, I can't access vista at all now. After messing around with it a bit I now get a screen that comes up and asks if I want to boot to Windows, openSuse, or openSuse (failsafe). If I select openSuse everything works fine. However, if I select windows I get a screen that comes up and says:

rootnoverify (hd 1,1)
chainloader (hd 0,0)+1

How do I fix this?

Is there a way to make it so that my computer automatically boots up with Vista as fast as it usually does or will there always be a screen asking me which boot I want?


At this point I just want to uninstall Suse and get Vista working again. However, if I just unplug the Suse harddrive I get the following error:

GRUB Loading Stage 1.5

GRUB Loading, please wait
Error 21

At the very least I want to be able to use Vista. How do I fix this? Is GRUB something that Suse loaded in my Bios? How do I just return to being able to actually use my computer?

Get your vista rescue cd and restore the mbr. Sorry you're leaving linux for vista.

I don't want to leave linux, I just want my computer to work. I have no clue how to repair the mbr. People say to put the disk in, reboot and then type fixmbr but I never get to a screen where I can type anything. How do I restore the mbr?

Also, if I kept Suse on my computer how do I get it working with Vista?

There are howto's on the web about using the windows loader to chainload grub instead of the other way around. Vista doesn't have a c:\boot.ini file, but if you create one Vista will use it. Search on google for "nt grub dual boot" if you are interested.

rootnoverify (hd 1,1)
chainloader (hd 0,0)+1

Change the above entry to: rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,0) +1

Your Opensuse entry must be alright if you can boot to it. The reason your vista entry doesn't boot is the vista drive is set as first boot priority and Grub was installed to the mbr of that drive. The majority of the Grub bootloader is on the partition/drive with Opensuse and the entry in the mbr is a tiny part of it and is in the mbr of the vista drive. The Grub in the mbr of the vista drive looks for the rest of the bootloader which is on the unplugged drive so obviously won't work.

If the above doesn't work, boot into Opensuse and log in as root and post the output of the 'fdisk -l' command and your /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

Looking at your first post, it appears you have spaces in the (hd 1,1), no spaces and the (hdo,o) looks like the letter 'O' not the number zero?

Grub doesn't do anything to the BIOS.