Hi, I'm a newbie to linux and I'm running into issues with installing suse.

Basically when it came to formatting, i told it to shrink my existing windows partition (I have 2 hard disks, 1 80 GB with windows xp and another 250 GB with no OS just NTFS partition)

Instead what it did is reserve 1 GB for swap space on my 2nd HD and about 150 GB for the root lesving 70 GB for NTFS which is not what i want.

The installation itself didn't even work, after doing CD 1 when it came to the Grub loader it said error 21. But after doing something (can't remember what, at least i get the boot screen and can get into windows. I guess it installs the MBR in disk 1? If I try to enter Linux i get a grey screen and asks for login and password which i didn't specifu so basically I can't even go into linux.

Any ideas as to how to fix this mess. Ideally I would have liked to have a separate parition for linux (root and swap) but not 150 GB as I want the rest for NTFS. Is there a way I can undo my previous installtion or uninstall suse altogehter?

And how should I partition my hard drives to do this?

thanks

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Hi, try the new "gparted" live cd to partition your drive(s). It's fully graphical and allows you to resize NTFS partitions. If you like you can get rid linux with it by simply deleting the linux partitions you created earlier.
Get it here.

edit: Use windows to restore your mbr back to normal beforehand, as the grub bootloader looks at the grub config file (/boot/grub/menu.lst) at boot time!

Hi Tuttle,

how do i use windows to restore the MBR back to before?

thanks

Using any windows boot disk, the command "fdisk /mbr" should restore your windows mbr
edit: I think you can do it while windows is booted too, in a command prompt... I think!

If i do a delete partition in disk managment in windows, will that delete linux?

thanks

Yup, that should do it too.

Hey Tuttle,

any idea on how I should format this on my 2nd hard drive (ex: what size partitions should i create for swap and root etc and any other partitions needed). I do want to leave most of the space as NTFS. and should i unistall my previous installtion first and then try again?

thanks again

If you just want to try things out, I would suggest you watch these clips and then try it -> http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/07/20/1654251

edit: remember to choose the second (250Gig) hard disk before playing with the partitions!

No un-installation necessary, when you remove a partition consider all data on that partition removed too, including the O.S.

hey tuttle ,
thanks. For now i'm gonna uninstall the one I have and re-install it. can you confirm that doing fixmbr won't scew up anything if i want to remove grub as the loader (ie should i back up my files before?)

thanks again

what are the partitions needed and how much space should be allocated (swap, root and what else??)

fixmbr shouldn't touch anything except the first 512 bytes of your disk.
Like it says in the video, approximately 1Gb for swap and another 6Gb partition for root. If you decide later that you like it, you can always add another partition for /home but you don't need it yet.