First things first: I should probably post the hard drives (via fdisk -l). There are 4; 2 of which are set up as a RAID 0 in XP

Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB <-1st of 2 disks for RAID 0
/dev/sda1

Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB <-What all Windows partitions are on
/dev/sdb1 (Boot) (XP Media) (352.2 GiB)
/dev/sdb2 (Win 9n extend)
/dev/sdb5 (blank) (104.9 GiB) <-What XP Home was on
/dev/sdb6 (Server 03) (136.6 GiB) <-yea...VERY out dated but It's to keep me familiar with server environment
/dev/sdb7 (blank) (196.1 Gib) <-What 7 was on...

And I think there's still unused space on there.

Disk /dev/sdc: 1500.3 GB <-2nd disk for RAID 0
/dev/sdc1

Disk /dev/sdd: 250.1 GB <-What Suse is on
/dev/sdd1 (swap) (2 GB)
/dev/sdd2 (/) (20 GB)
/dev/sdd3 (/home) (211 GB)


My whole thing started when Suse 12.1 had a problem loading the disk, but I felt I could do without it for a while. The boot sequence went as followed:

Turn on -> Grub (openSUSE/failsafe openSUSE/Windows/Floopy) -Windows-> (Windows 7/Older Versions of Windows) -Older Version-> (XP Media/HP Home/Server 03)

Eventually I got fed up and burned SUSE 12.2 and completely overwrote 12.1. I restarted, went in...and everything was ok. I restarted again and everything was ok on the windows side of things (7/XP/Server).

Then, Wednesday night, SUSE said it found updates. I allowed it to do so...though I didn't realize until the next day that they hadn't installed for some reason...but it was coming up on midnight. I shut down and went to bed.

Thursday morning I start up. Grub loads & I select windows 7. On the windows 7 screen I select older versions.

"HI...NTLDR croaked. You can't access this stuff."

Through 7 I began looking for ways to try and fix NTLDR, but with no success. Then I thought that, if I uninstalled 7 and reinstalled SUSE, then SUSE would see both XP and Server instead of 7.

I was wrong.

So I tried to reinstall 7 to try and reconstruct the "bridge in the middle". No dice. I uninstall XP Home (sdb5) and then try and reinstall it thinking it would fix NTLDR. It wouldn't let me reinstall XP Home.

Now...here's the thing: all of my vital stuff: Music, Games, Drawings, RESUME is on XP. Doing a complete wipe would kill all of it...and everything of value exceeds what the SUSE HD can hold.

Somehow I need to reset GRUB to something like "openSUSE/ failsafe openSUSE/Windows XP/Server" (I know Floppy was removed for the 12.2 selection) but I'm hitting dead ends. Some people suggest using Ubuntu, but I've never used Ubuntu; SUSE is my only ground.

So...yes...this is going to be a serious learning experience. Please help.

Hi Ancient!

Sorry about all the difficulties you've had.

I can see that you've made an effort to supply details of your disk layout. What I'm not entirely clear about is the sequence of events.

When you talk about SUSE having a problem loading "the disk", what disk?

Without a detailed understanding of the sequence of events, I can only offer general comments.

Although we all have our preferences, some may be personal while other preferences might be more analytically based, even though I respect Windows 7 more than any previous form of MS-Windows, I would probably trust my least favorite distribution of Linux to "play nice" with other Operating Systems, more than I would trust just about any form of MS-Windows to do so. My feeling is that when I've allowed some forms of Windows to manage a multi-boot environment, I've seen them disable active Linux partitions, and all sorts of anti-social stuff. So my prime suspect in a multi-boot environment would almost always be MS-Windows, rather than any Linux distribution.

I realize that it may seem natural to let a Windows boot manager manage the booting of Windows, but I generally feel safer letting Grub do it.

In general, I would suggest not relying purely of /dev/sd* device designations. Rather verify unique drive identifiers.

Please give a more detailed description of the original configuration, the original problem, and step by step, the development of any subsequent issues.

Most of the tools you will want to use to fix your windows bootloaders will be available via the Windows CDs themselves. For Windows XP, you will need to boot from the OS disk, then run the recovery console. With any amount of luck, the recovery console should be able to detect your windows operating systems. From there you will be able to run 'chkdsk' and 'fixboot' to fix your bootup issues.

I cannot yet say if fixboot will erase/overwrite your GRUB bootloader, but it should restore the essential files you need to boot a Windows OS.

As far as Win7 goes, it has more automated tools to repair bootups, but you have less control over those tools and I do think that they would be more likely to overwrite your GRUB bootloader.

At this point you would likely need to reinstall GRUB from a LiveCD.

Thank you...whoever it is that blessed me. This is the last time I entrust my passwords to Norton. This is my actual account, but because I couldn't find where I wrote down the password (and couldn't guess at it correctly), Ancient was created until I could get this back (it took 4 days to find that notebook ).

Zero Angel: Tried Recovery, but I don't know the password. I tried just hitting enter, as well as entering the password for my account, but no luck

MAJOR EDIT AT BOTTOM

kakaka:

The 4 hard drives are as follows:
2 Seagate 1.5 TB hard drives set up in a RAID 0 (sda & sdc)
1 Western Digital 1 TB hard drive (XP Media is C:, XP Home is D:, Server 03 is E:, F: is a blank partition I have set aside for me to learn server 08 if I can get my hands on it, and G: is Win 7) (sdb)
1 Samsung 250 GB hard drive (This is what SUSE is on) (sdd)


THIS was my initial problem with SUSE, which was solved when I overwrote 12.1 with 12.2. Now we hit the present problem.

The "SUSE loading this disk" would be Suse loading the Windows Hard drive (sdb). Everything was installed backwards to help ensure things went ok. First Media, then Home, then Server, then the partition for 08, then 7. All of those were put onto the Western Digital Hard Drive. After that, SUSE was installed onto the Samsung hard drive.

When the computer booted up after I installed 12.2, I selected it to ensure things were ok. Sure enough, I could get in. I then restarted and selected the Windows option, which took me to the milti-boot for windows 7. I selected "older versions" and I was taken to the multi-boot for that (XP Media, XP Home, Server 03). Everything worked fine.

Put more simply:

Boot->Grub2->SUSE/FailsafeSUSE/Windows7 (on sdb)-> Windows7/Older Versions of Windows-> XP Media/XP Hone/Server 03

Wednesday night I went in and the icon in the lower right (gear with the lock in it) shows up saying "you have 34 updates". Apper open up and I click "apply". Apper did its whole download thing, but...little did I know...nothing was installed (I learned this because I went into SUSE the next day and all the updates were still there). Something came up, but I'm not sure if it was an error or not. I didn't pay attention to it. I shut down and went to bed.

Thursday morning I start up. As usual, Grub loads. I select windows 7. On the windows 7 screen I select older versions, and some error about NTLDR popped up. Unfortunately, I can't recreate it to say it wort for word. Regardless, I couldn't get into either XP or Server.

I restarted and went into windows 7, looking for ways to repair NTLDR, but all they talked about was Windows 7. Then I thought that, if I uninstalled Windows 7, GRUB would look for the other Windows partitions (instead of saying Windows 7 on sdb, it would say XP Media on sdb, XP home on sdb and Server 03 on sdb). That failed.

So, I tried to reinstall 7 back onto the Western Digital (Windows) hard drive to try and get things back to where they were BEFORE I pulled the uninstall, but no matter what partition I chose on the Western Digital it wouldn't install. Trying to reinstall Windows 7 on the Windows HD stalls at “where do you want to install Windows”:
“Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. See the Setup log files for more information.”

At that point I gave up with 7 and then uninstalled XP Home via its instillation CD, thinking that, if I reinstalled XP Home, it would fix NTLDR and then all I'd have to do was re-install SUSE. And...that didn't work.

And so I can now only boot into SUSE, since selecting Windows 7 creates the following error:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:
1. Insert your Windows instillation disk & restart your computer
2. Choose your language, and then select next.
3. Click "repair your computer"

If you do not have this disk, contact your system administrator or computer manufacturer for assistance
File: \windows\system32\winloader.exe
status: 0xc0000225
Info: the selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt.



Whenever I try to reinstall XP Home results in the following:
To install Windows XP on the partition you selected,
Setup must write some startup files to the following disk:

238473 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]

However, this disk does not contain a Windows XP-compatible partition.

To continue installing Windows XP, return to the partition selection screen and create a Windows XP-compatible partition on the disk above.If there is no free space on the disk, delete an existing partition, and then create a new one.

To return to the partition selection screen, press enter.

The Partition selection screen is as follows:

953868 MB Disk 0 at ID 1 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]
C: Partition1 <Media> [NTFS] 360662 MB
D: Partition2 [NTFS] 107466 MB
E: Partition3 <Server 03> [NTFS] 139886 MB
F: Partition4 [NTFS} 200853 MB
Unpartitioned space 145002 MB

1430797 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]
W: Partition1 <Local Disk> [NTFS] 1430797 MB

1430797 MB Disk 0 at Id 1 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]
W: Partition1 <Local Disk> [NTFS] 1430797 MB

238473 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]
N: Partition1 [Unknown] 2054 MB
O: Partition2 [Unknown] 20481 MB
P: Partition3 [Unknown] 215939 MB

I'm guessing the “238473 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]” is the SUSE hard drive...which, in that case, explains why nothing can be installed, but here's the thing: I try to instal XP on either D or F. Why it's trying to instal it there...is Windows trying to reclaim being the boot loader?

There is one piece of good news I discovered here: Drive W could be deleted, so now both of those are blank. Potential safety net.


Now, a few people suggested I try and work Ubuntu into this. I did, and when I stopped the install of Ubuntu partway (something seemed off because it didn't ask where I wanted to instal) I saw (via SUSE) it was installing itself onto the un-partitioned space of the Windows drive.

Do you think allowing Ubuntu to install itself on the remaining space of the Windows drive will fix the MBR record problem?


Update:
OK...Good news & Weird news.

Good News is that, by changing which drive was the boot drive (Samsung-Suse to Western Digital-Windows), I was able to reinstall both Home and 7...thus restoring the drive to Media (C), Home (D), Server (E), Blank (F), Win7 (G) (obviously 7 sets itself as C). And thus I am able to speak from my normal OS (Media) (I guess everything was trying to install itself to the Samsung-Suse drive).

This results in the weird news.

By getting everything restored for windows, I flipped the boot drive back to Samsung (Suse). Same thing: Suse - Windows 7/older Version.

This time I actually had my camera ready when I selected Older Version:

Invalid BOOT.INI file
Booting from C:\windows\
NTDETECT failed

So whenever I have the SUSE hard drive set as the boot drive, I hit this for media, home & server...and if I have the Windows hard drive set as the boot drive, I hit no problems.

Did something change between 12.1 and 12.2? Because I didn't run into this with 12.1.

And now I really am curious: Would installing Ubuntu on the rest of the Western Digital help with the problem between SUSE and windows?

You've got way too many frying pans in the fire. I fail to see how you can actually need two versions of XP, Windows 7, and Windows Server. One install of Windows should suffice for any normal purposes. All you're doing is creating a massive duplication of effort. If you need a server, use a separate computer. The issues you're describing could easily be cause by a hardware problem and have nothing to do with any of the operating systems...and I think the last thing you'd want to do at this point would be to install another OS still to try to boot the others.

Hi warriorjames!

I may be missing something in what you've said, but various things you said, raised some questions.

It seems as if, at one point, you had various MS-Windows OS's installed on different partitions, then sometime later, those partitions were considered to be blank. Since you've got various OS's involved, naturally the question is, what considered those partitions to be blank? A particular version of MS-Windows? Linux? Although with various OS's, when you re-install you might have the option of telling the install procedure not to format a partition, if the OS considers the partition to be blank, I would not expect to recover the data by re-installing. Instead I would expect to have to follow some, "repair" procedure in order to be able to recover the data. But I thought you mentioned that you had critical data that you didn't want to lose ( and it sounded as if maybe you didn't have a backup of it ), so I'd be very concerned that by trying to solve this at the level of re-installing OS's, or installing other OS's, critical data might get clobbered.

You mentioned:

but if you later discovered what it was that happened, I must have missed mention of it. If I understood, that problem seemed to occur about the same time as the other problem first occurred, so I would be very concerned that the one problem might have caused the other; I'd want to go back into the log files to see if I could determine what the problem was that occurred near midnight that one day. Why did the updates fail? Exactly what updates failed? In exactly what state was the system left, after the updates failed?

Just to cover all the potential issues, I don't know exactly in what sense you meant that /dev/sdb2 is a "Win 9n" extended partition, but in general principle, I'd be concerned about setting up a disk and partitions with an older OS, and then using it to contain newer OS's. I'd always wonder if the newer OS is completely backward compatible for disk management purposes. When I've tried to use an extended partition containing forms of MS-Windows in a multi-boot environment with Linux, I've seen the extended partition identified as "W95 Ext'd (LBA)". But in such a case, the partition wasn't actually created/managed by Win '95. If "Win 9n" is just how Linux identified the partition in your case, then the particular form of MS-Windows that Linux spits out with the partition type identifier, is probably not an issue.

However, in general principle, I feel I've seen problems using extended partitions containing MS-Windows, in a multi-boot situation with Linux.

Although I've had more experience with MS-Windows that I usually care to admit, I'm not an MS-Windows expert, so I could easily be mistaken, but I thought Win 7 required a separate "System Reserved" partition, or some such. Since I didn't seem to see such a partition mentioned in your disk set up, I'm wondering if that could be "mapped" on top of some other partition and maybe that could be causing problems?

Naturally with Linux, if you are using any sort of "installation management" software, one goal of that software can be to make sure the system is left in a "consistent" state, almost no matter what sort of errors occur during an installation. But that doesn't mean that no system has ever been left in what could be called an "in-consistent" state. I wouldn't be incredibly surprised if the failure of the update procedure you experienced, affected the boot environment, in some way, such as affecting the disk drive "mapping" for some sort of chain loading, or whatever.

re, Ubuntu versus SUSE: Myself, and some other people I know, have had problems running some of the Ubuntu-11.* series on the same hardware where SUSE 11.* had no problems. I'd tend to stay with SUSE first.

BOTTOM LINE: it seems like you've got a fairly involved set-up, with a number of potential points of failure, hardware and software. If you try to solve the problem at a high/general level, you may end up "hiding" issues that are taking place at a lower/more-detailed level ( and may increase the risk of losing critical data ).