I have Win XP Pro (standard 32-bit version) installed on a SATA 300Gb disk, when I partitioned the drive prior to installing XP I made a spare partition of 10Gb. The Computer's processor is an AMD 3500 64-bit

I have installed (I think?) SuSE 9.3 Pro 64-bit version to this spare partition however on reboot after installing I was faced with a blank monitor (the monitor stays live IE it doesn't switch to standby) this indicated to me that activity was taking place but I don't know what activity that was?

Reset the computer after 5 minutes and got the SUSE boot up options of

Boot to SuSE Linux 9.3
Windows
Floppy
Boot to SuSE 9.3 Linux (Failsafe)

I cannot boot into SuSE Linux 9.3, however I can boot to Windows or I can boot to the Failsafe option but unfortunately I haven't a clue which commands to enter or indeed how to proceed from here.

I haven't got a rescue floppy and when I tried to make one from the SuSE DVD boot folder Windows told me that the file (1.40Mb) was too large for the formatted floppy disk?

Back into Windows Disk management the partition (NTFS) which I loaded SuSE to does not have a letter and are now shown as two partitions 1012 MB and 8.38 MB respectively, no file system is shown, type = basic, both 100% free.

Can I do an over the top install of SuSE and if so how would I choose the partition to install to without having a drive letter to refer to?

Can I uninstall SuSE and start again? if so How do I uninstall?

All points of view are welcome......... cos I am stuck.........

Cheers..................thingmajig

do you have a prompt with SuSE boot?

Thanks rkettle,
Yes I do get a prompt when trying to boot into SuSE Linux (Failsafe)

type

#startx

do not type the # LOL

Oh dear, I'm afraid there is no response to the keyboard showing on the monitor

The prompt cursor just keeps flashing, no error, no bad command etc.?

The last line is ....PCI: Via IRQ fixup

have not used suse in a while

do you have xserver installed?

if not you ned to install it...

just type

#yast

and choose xservers and a desktp... kde

Regards
Richard

Thanks Richard,
Can't type any commands in, I really think this installation hasn't worked.

I'll try and uninstall and retry, thanks for your help, I'll post the results to this thread.

Think, is it really worth the time troubleshooting? If the above fails, just reinstall Suse 9.3. I have done so successfully many times as a "new installation" without affecting my windows partition. Make sure you know the layout of your HD (i.e. what is on hda1, hda2, hda3 etc.) so you install and format the right partitions within the Suse 9.3 installer.

By the way - there is no such thing as "uninstalling" an operating system. You blow it away (reformat the partition).

Good luck.

Thanks guys for your help, I have reinstalled the OS and everything is now OK ............Thanks again.

Good to hear. Windows will not recognize Linux partitions and I think that is why it doesn't give it a drive letter. The cool thing about SuSE is that it sees your Windows partition and (if it is NTFS) will give you read access to it in the folder in /windows/c/ or /media/YOUR_VOLUME_LABEL/. If in the future you need to share documents between Linux and Windows you will need a FAT32 partition (readable and writable by both OS's) or use alternatively use Samba with Linux to access files in Windows.

Thanks Alfred for the tips, handy to know about the FAT 32 partition as all the other partitions are formatted as NTFS.

Ted