Hi.
i am very new to Linux and i was reccommened to use SUSE Linux by a friend of mine in the industry. i have installed it on a laptop and i wanted to do it along side windows as i am not the only person that uses the laptop but i am the only person interested in using Linux.
i installed SUSE Linux 9.1 personal, from the ISO given on this site, sucesfully however, during the install my windows 'BOOT.INI' file became corrupted. i have tried to restore this however i cannot overwrite the file with my back up and i cannot write to my windows folder at all. i have logged in as Root user and i cannot change permission of drives or files. can anyone tell me how i can write to the windows folder?
thanks.
Mike

Are you sure boot.ini is hosed? That shouldn't happen.

You didn't specify which version of windows, but if it uses boot.ini it must be either 2000 or XP. You also didn't specify which file system is being used, but probably it is NTFS.

If you cannot boot into Windows, that does not mean that boot.ini is messed up (though that could be the case); it could mean that the boot loader is now set to do linux only. I would consider this to be far more likely than the possibility that boot.ini got damaged by a linux install in a different partition.

It is dangerous to try to write from Linux to NTFS, and this is not recommended. You can use this package if you must have write capability,

http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/

but again, I am skeptical that this is your problem. Please provide more information on what exactly is happening.

boot.ini is a text file; have you tried to read it with an editor (either in Linux or Windows?

What boot loader did you install?

Does that boot loader give you the option to start Windows at boot time?

I re-read your post, and it doesn't say anything about how you have your drive partitioned.

Exactly where did you install the Linux distro? Tell me it wasn't on the same partition as Windows?

its in a seperate partition.....when i switch on my laptop i get a menu come up asking what i want to load, windows, linux, floppy or (failsafe??)

i have looked at the boot.ini file and compared it to that of another XP boot.ini file on a different computer and it has deffinately been changed. it looks like it has been encripted, but i didnt know why it would be so i assumed it had been corrupted.

Mike

well, in that case you need to replace it. If you don't have a windows boot floppy to start your system then you probably should look at the captive ntfs system for linux.