I recently installed SLED 10, but I didn't really know what I was doing and sort of ruined everything... Now I'm starting afresh. I've reinstalled Windows, and now I want to install SLED 10 and a boot manager, so that I can boot either Windows or SLED 10.

I've got a plan, but I don't want to ruin everything again, so I would really appreciate if someone clever would approve my plan, or tell me if I should do anything differently.

Here's the system I have now:
2 hard disks - the first one is 80GB and the second is 250GB (I'll call them DISK1 and DISK2).

I have 3 partitions on DISK1 (80GB):
1. a FAT32 partition with Windows XP installed (10GB),
2. a "Linux Ext 3" partition (10GB), which I made using Partition Magic (in Windows), which I plan to install SLED 10 on (is "Linux Ext 3" the right format?).
3. another FAT32 partition (about 60GB) which I use for various things in Windows.

My plan is to create two more partions for Linux on DISK2 -- the SWAP partition and the big "/home" partition. I'm not certain about how I should do this though.

And the thing I'm most confused about is installing the boot manager. Last time I installed SLED 10, the GRUB boot manager came with it. But when I chose Windows from the GRUB boot menu, I just got some error -- "NTLDR is missing". Even when I tried to boot Windows using my "Smart boot manager" floppy disk, it didn't work (even though it used to work before I installed SLED10). Now I've started all over again, and I want to make sure I get it right.

Ideally, I would like to use another boot manager (like Boot Magic), and install SLED10 without installing GRUB. But I would appreciate any advice on which is best. I don't really understand boot managers... do you need to make a special partition for a boot manager, and set that one active? If so, does that partition need to be in a particular place (e.g. the beginning of the first disk)? Or is it something else altogether?

At first, as far as I know the SLED should have an graphical installer program where you can set your own prferences for the partition table. Look at the SLED website for install instructions to learn how to change the defaults settings there.
Second SUSE distributions (like SLED) normally use ReiserFS as default filesystem, but you can also choose ext3 if you prefer it.
At last the other big bootloaser for linux systems is lilo, you should be able do choose it in the graphical installer.

Either Lilo or Grub. SLED schould install one of the two automatically. Try installing SLED and if you have trouble, come back here for help before wiping the drive.

But I already did have trouble. I installed SLED 10 and it automatically installed Grub. And Grub recognised the Windows installation automatically, but the menu option didn't work. When booting Windows through Grub, it said "NTLDR is missing - Press any key to restart".

I used to be able to boot Windows using a "Smart boot manager" floppy disk, but that stopped working after I installed SLED10/Grub. It seemed that the installation had somehow altered the Windows partition to remove the NTLDR (which apparently means "new technology loader"), but it hadn't altered any of the other Windows files --- I could access them from Linux. And this was even though I had created all 3 Linux partitions on the 2nd hard disk, and Windows was on the 1st. So I don't understand why Windows didn't work.

I want to be sure this won't happen again. I want to get SLED10 working again, but I need Windows working to do my job. Does anyone know what caused it?

I think its probably pointing at the wrong windows partition, confirm this by checking the grub config against fstab (ie, if XP lives on /dev/hda1 then make sure grub is pointing to /dev/hda1)


If grub is indeed pointing to the right place, then windows must be corrupt. In which case you can repair it following instructions from this page: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm

IMPORTANT: Before you do that, make sure you have a linux boot disc as XP recovery may automatically clear the MBR, and definitely will if you let the wizard run - which will then mean you need to login to linux and execute grub to rebuild it I think (well, you would for lilo anyway).


*Sorry for the lack of specific commands, I don't know GRUB very well, but someone else here is bound to be able to help you more then I can. I just hope this post gives you somewhere to start, so grab a coffee and open google

Yes, the Windows partition was definitely corrupted. As I said, it wasn't just Grub -- even booting Windows from a floppy didn't work after I installed Linux.

I am not going to install Linux again until I am sure that it won't affect the Windows partition. Installing Linux somehow corrupted the Windows partition (even though I installed Linux on a different hard disk). All the files on the Windows partition were still fine (I could access them in Linux), just the NTLDR was missing so I couldn't boot it.Why?