[Help] Windows Vista and OpenSuse 10.3 Dual Boot
 

hello everyone, well i i a n00b on linux and i installed Windows Vista and OpenSuse 10.3 in the same hard drive but i dont know how to configure Grub
so it could let me load to Windows vista, i now opensuse has a bootloader that looks like this:
http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/4...apshot1hn0.png
can someone help me how to fix the bootloader so i can boot to windows vista, thank you.

I see that there are Windows partitions on /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2. Did you partition two different two different NTFS partitions for Vista? I was just wondering how many partitions that you had set up on this one drive to possibly help clarify what has been done.

yes i have two NTFS partitions one for windows vista and te other one i just made it to separate files

Remove the entry for the partition that just has data. The other one should work. I don't have Vista. The part I'm not sure of is the "root=" entry. It should refer to the root partition of your Linux system. Due to chainloading it probably wouldn't matter anyway.

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P.S. Please capitalize the word "I".

One of those two physical drives will need to have the Windoze Vista boot loader. An older Master Boot Record won't work; it needs to be specific to Vista.

When you first power up your machine, is GRUB the bootloader that comes up? Can you boot cleanly to openSUSE 10.3? How about Vista?

I got mine working by installing the Vista MBR on my one hard disk, but setting the boot partition w/ gparted to set the boot flag on my openSUSE /boot partition. GRUB is installed on the /boot partition, so when the computer powered up I saw the GRUB menu. Select openSUSE, and it boots like a proper linux system. :]

Select Vista, and it chainload()s the Vista boot loader. I select the only entry on Vista's boot menu, and Vista starts up fine. In my case, I need to select Vista on two different menus, the first one being GRUB, and the second one being the native Vista boot loader.

There's probably a sneaky way to bypass the Vista boot loader so that you only need to select "Vista" once, but I don't know how to do that. If someone does, feel free to chime in!

This is just the way I've been able to get mine dual booting. If someone knows how to convince Vista's boot loader to load linux, I'm all ears...

Thankz to everyone it worked!!!

Boot Pro.
 

CAN U TELL ME WHAT 0S U FIRST LODED?

WIN VISTA OR SUSE 10.

[If u loaded vista first then pls use suse boot loader in defaults settings witch loads both os menus]

sachin

My laptop came pre-installed with Vista. Out of the box, there were two partitions configured. The first one was ~1 gig of material, basically the same stuff that was on the installation CDs. The second one was NTFS, and it contained the installed Vista.

I didn't touch the recovery partition. For the big NTFS partition, I used Vista's disk manager (right click on the "My Computer" icon, I believe) to reduce its size. For some reason, it would only shrink the partition size to the point that I had ~40% of the filesystem free. I'm sure it makes sense to Bill Gates, but not to me. I downloaded the gparted ISO and burned it to CD. gparted's ISO is a Live CD with some flavor of linux (I forget which), and about all that it provides is gparted and a bash shell prompt. Right click on the desktop to see the (very short) menu of software.

gparted had no issues with shrinking the Vista partition until it showed about 15% free (10-12 gig free). On my Toshiba Satellite A135-S4467, it took me ~48 hours. No, I'm not kidding. The discussion threads warned me about that possibility. Some systems need a few minutes to do the reduction, while others, like mine, needed many hours. I guess my laptop has funky hardware, but hey, the thing was on sale... =)

Once the partition was shrunk, I booted the openSUSE 10.3 DVD and installed linux with a customized layout. I'll add a post with the screenshots later today (gotta work this morning). /boot got 100 meg, and the rest got set up as one big Extended partition, made up of a Linux Swap filesystem, a ReiserFS root filesystem, and a big LVM volume group. LVM will let you add and resize its filesystems on the fly; no shutting down or rebooting so long as you're running linux.

Code:

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linus-three:/home/will/azureus # fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00018a40

  Device Boot      Start        End      Blocks  Id  System
/dev/sda1              1        192    1536000  27  Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2            193        8352    65545200    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3  *        8353        8365      104422+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4            8366      19457    89096490    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            8366        8757    3148708+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6            8758        9019    2104483+  83  Linux
/dev/sda7            9020      19457    83843203+  8e  Linux LVM
linus-three:/home/will/azureus #

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/dev/sda7 is managed from the LVM. The gparted live CD has all of the funny NTFS drivers pre-installed, so it shows the full set of options and filesystem types. The one I installed under linux didn't come with all of the 50 gazillion kernel modules you need for every filesystem type.

My /boot/grub/menu.lst now looks like so:

Dual Boot with Vista
 

I have posted about this before. Here is the link.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-error-600302/

It is a couple of pages in.