HELP! Suse9.2 "Failed to boot from Hard Disk..."
 

Help! I have been running a dual boot xp/Suse 9.2 system for about a month now. I have been using Suse for pretty much everything, save for CAD work that I have to do on Windows. This morning suse froze on me, so I had to manually restart the computer. I happened to have the Suse 9.2 Dvd in the DVD drive, so it loaded to the Grub screen asking whether or not I wanted to start from the Hard disk. Fine, so I tried to boot from the hard disk and it says "failed to boot from Hard Disk." No matter what I do, I cannot get anything to boot, this of course also means XP because I can't get to Grub that is on the hard disk itself...only from the DVD. If I boot without the DVD in the drive, the screen basically goes blank save for some little blips at the bottom of the screen. I have XP installed on sda1, and linux is installed on sdb1...so basically two separate drives. Initally I thought that since I really didn't have anthing critical on my Suse partition on that drive I would just do a reinstall, but when I do that, the only drive that shows up for installation is sda1, which I do not want to repartition. Anybody know what to do? My computer is basically useless at this point, and I am not familiar enough with linux to use the rescue console. Thanks in advance
-Eli

From your description it looks like you have 2 SCSI drives - sda1 with Windows and also your bootloader (GRUB?) and sdb1 with SuSE. From your account it looks like the second hard disk has died for some reason, which you appear to confirm because a reinstall doesn't find it. With SCSI, any disk problem is going to cause problems because the SCSI modules have to be loaded to boot and therefore if a boot device is missing the boot will hang - which is what you appear to be experiencing.

If you can activate the SCSI configuration on boot up (Ctrl - A for Adaptec controllers) you can test to see what has happened to your second drive. If it is dead then you need to find a way of changing the bootloader so that it ignores it so that at least you can boot Windows. The SuSE installation DVD may help here:choose installation then after region set up choose Repair Installed System and then Expert then Install New Boot Loader. This will allow you to examine your current setup and hopefully change the default to Windows and remove the linux option on sdb which no longer exists.

If the disk shows up in the SCSI utilities then it's probably a corrupt filing system - once again the Repair Installed System can check that out and hopefully repair it.

Before now I've had a secondary SCSI disk failure, removed the disk and had exactly the problems you're experiencing. I had to put the disk back in - luckily it sprang into life long enough to remove it from fstab and then I could remove it safely.

Good luck

Thanks for the response. I actually figured before getting your answer that something was going wrong with the second disk, so I disconnected it on that hunch, and then reconnected it and Voila! Just like what happened with you, it started back up again luckily. Thanks again.
-Eli