I am having a little trouble installing SuSE 10.3 on my 2nd hard disk. The 1st disk is a Windows XP install. The motherboard is Raid capable but is turned off in the BIOS and I did not install the Raid drivers on Windows. When I try to install using SuSE 10.3 (or Fedora 9 for that matter...earlier killed my Windows install and had to reinstall EVERYTHING) it lists a raid partition of /dev/mapper/nvidia_fihcddbh (MBR). I can try to manually set up the partitions by deleting the raid partition and manually selecting the mount points under the 2nd disk but under the Expert tab install shows that Grub is going to try to install under /dev/mapper/nvidia_fihcddbh (MBR). After spending a great deal of time trying to fix the disaster my 1st attempt caused I am very reluctant to install again with the install showing these raid mount points. Has anyone come across this? Any suggestions?

Suse has always the the fact that she like to install GRUB in MBR of the first disk, I have never manage to change this


all the best

In a non-RAID environment I used to install GRUB in the boot sector of its root on the second disk. Could be started with the NTLDR after modifying the boot.ini accordingly, so I disagree with ronlau9 from my own experience (Vista has a changed booting mechanism AFAIK).

On the other hand "/dev/mapper/..." refers on my system to a LVM volume. What exactly did you do during installs?

Well during the 1st install that caused the XP drive to not be bootable I just used the defaults that Fedora 9 suggested. These were the "/dev/mapper/..." drive listings. Since I had not seen this before as it has been a couple years since I tried installing a Linux distro I just assumed it was a different drive naming convention due to the SATA drives I am using. After Fedora completed the install and tried to reboot was when I had the problem with Grub not booting anything and was forced to completely reinstall XP. Last night when I was going to try to install SuSE 10.3 it was showing the same "/dev/mapper/..." drive listings. I tried custom partitioning and made mount points similar to what it proposed but wasn't sure where to have Grub installed. I thought about having Grub install in the boot partition as you suggested but wasn't sure how to direct the windows bootloader to it. I would also be fine with installing grub on the MBR of the XP drive as long as it doesn't make it unbootable and give me the same problem I had earlier. Thanks for the suggestion about the NTLDR though that may be the way I have to go to get this running if I can just figure out how to direct it there. Although I think I do prefer using Grub.

Here are examples what to do on a NT system:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...0/#post2611545
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...57/#post905049

I think, though, that the actual boot loader resides in the first 45x bytes of the first sector -- not the whole 512, but it worked for me with "bs=512". And yes, GRUB should be able to handle this, so you might consider creating an image of your working installation of Vista so you can do a fast restore if need be.

I found a solution to the problem last night. Per the instructions here I installed SuSE 10.3 on the second hard drive w/ grub in the /boot partition (took out the raid partition from the default install configuration). I then used the bios to reverse the order of the hard drives. When I booted up with grub I had to edit the hard drive partition listings to get SuSE 10.3 to boot. Then after it did I just edited menu.lst and added the windows entry. Now I have a dual booting system. I may still look into the other options just to see how I could have done it and kept the drives in the original order. I want to thank you guys for taking the time to help. Very much appreciated.