So I know that others have posted on this but I have a sneaking suspicion that my situation may be unique. Here's what I did, and with what.

AMD Athlon64 3500+ on a Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 with a Seagate 200GB IDE drive as master and a Western Digital 60GB ide drive as slave. I used the Seagate Drive Utility (DiskWizard SE) to format both drives as NTFS. The next setup option stated that I had to choose whether or not to designate the second drive as a boot drive or extra storage. I chose to install the drive as a boot drive. I assume this wrote an MBR to it and adjusted my BIOS accordingly. Next I installed Windows XP Pro SP2 to the second drive. My thought was that it would simply write the NTLDR crap to the second drive and avoid writing anything to the first drive, upon which I then installed OpenSUSE. The good news is that SUSE runs great, the bad news is XP has decided to hide.

I checked the second drive and it has the Windows installation on it but when I tried to add the appropriate entry to my /grub/menu.list it just yielded a black screen displaying the grub entry:
etc...

now to the questions:

Is my MBR on the wrong drive?
Can I just boot from my Windows disc and pull a FIXMBR and install grub natively?
Should I just say &^ck all, whack out Windows and pray that Cedega will actually work this time?

-Kurt

What I would suggest is that you have an MBR on each physical drive - on the master for GRUB and on the slave for Windows. If you disable the master drive in the BIOS, then boot off your XP CD and do FIXBOOT and FIXMBR that should cure the XP problem. Then re-enable the master drive, and you should be able to boot your OS of choice.

Did XP run before you installed SUSE?

I think cdhgee is right on. Because XP could see both drives, it probably put its MBR on the master. You then wiped it out w/ GRUB. His fix should work provided you truly disable the master drive during the repair. Physically disconnecting it would not be too drastic, although disabling in the BIOS should work too.

Edit your grub config as and add this line:

Reviewing the thread:

1. Quote:

   Edit your grub config as and ...

   I assume you meant:
   Quote:

   "Edit your grub config as root and ..."?.

   Don't forget that the "grub config" is now called /boot/grub/menu.list.
   
2. The complete XP stanza would look like this:
   Code:

   title XP
   rootnoverify (hd1,0)
   makeactive
   chainloader +1

   Don't forget a title line to let GRUB know it's a new section, as well as what to display on the menu screen at boot. The 'makeactive' is a bit of insurance, "Winders" sometimes requires it.
   Code:

   rootnoverify (hd1)

   Will work just as well if the "Winders" MBR is installed on the slave.
   
3. Did XP run before you installed SUSE?
   
4. Come to think of it I would change one of cdhgee's words -- from:
   Quote:

   What I would suggest is that you have an MBR on each physical drive - on the master for GRUB and on the slave for Windows.

   to:
   Quote:

   What I would suggest is that you want an MBR on each physical drive - on the master for GRUB and on the slave for Windows.

   What you probably have is the "Winders" MBR on the primary & nothing on the slave.
   
5. Let me say again that the method in cdhgee's post #2 is sound & will make your "Winders" installation independent of your GNU/Linux.
   
6. Quote:

   ... but when I tried to add the appropriate entry to my /grub/menu.list it just yielded a black screen displaying the grub entry:

   How did you try to add that "appropriate entry"? -- What editor were you using?
   
   Maybe it's time to ask you to post your /boot/grub/menu.list, preferably in a "Code" block.
   
7. If you don't have it already, here is the GRUB Manual. If you lose the link, Google on "gnu grub manual" (include the quotes).