I installed Xp pro on my Gateway laptop (solo 2150) with a 20gb hdd,and then created a partition of 7gb to install Suse 9.1using Powerquest partition magic 8 which had to have its own partition in fat 32 of 250mb.
Everything went well untill i installed suse 9.1 and then i couldn'nt boot xp,so i installed a new mbr for xp and that worked but then i couldn'nt boot linux,so i went into partition magic 8 to see if linux was still there and it was but marked as hidden,so i marked it as active and tried again but it still would'nt boot using boot manager..Can any one help me before my head explodes!!!

I just installed SuSE 9.1 on two machines next to XP, and I had to resize the XP partitions to get some space for my Linux partiotions, in both cases.

I did it as follows:
1. I downloaded this iso of a bootable RescueCD (about 100M), which has a great partition resizing tool, "qtparted" on it: http://www.sysresccd.org/download.en.php
2. I burned the iso onto a CD.
3. I run "chkdsk /R" under WindowsXP to ensure the ntfs filesystem consistency. Chkdsk repaired some errors of which I never know about as XP never complained of them. (Qtparted will only resize the XP partition if the ntfs filesystem is consistent.)
4. I defragmented the XP partition.
5. I booted up from the RescueCD and run qtparted: "run_qtparted"
6. In qtparted I selected the XP partition and moved the partition size slider to a position corresponding to the new, smaller partition size; then committed the changes.
7. I booted up Windows XP, which this time did a file-system consistency checking (as it noticed that its partition had been resized). It found no errors, and things went as normal in WinXP after the next bootup.
8. I inserted the SuSE installation CD and installed SuSE 9.1 onto the free space. (SuSE installed its own bootloader: grub; so I can dual boot.)

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hey its a decent idea to install window then linux, i am familar with cfdisk it very easy you must have a label for each os that will identifly in your boot manger

or

if you can boot linux from a cd or from bootdisk that you made form installition i hope, put that in when it boot take a look at your fstab and your lilo.conf and past the info in to this fourm

I encountered the same problems, that I can't boot from xp after install SuSE 9.1, this is how I solution the problem.

(1) Reformat the Hard disk.
(2) Reinstall XP.
(3) defragment the hard disk.
(4) use partition magic to creates Linux and swap partition.
(5) use partition magic to format the Linux and swap partition s created in (4).
(6) install SuSE Linux 9.1

after the installation I can boot from XP and Linux and it run like a fox.

Of course, if he is a partitioning expert (or he want to become one) then he can use any partitioning tools he likes.

But if not: he can just burn that CD, boot up from it, run qtparted, move the "filesystem size" slider to the new size and commit the changes.
Now he has free space on his hard disk, and SuSE will do the rest (it will automatically install Grub as a bootloader).

However, I think his system is not "clean" for the time being, as an other bootloader (which does not work) sits in the MBR. So, first he should remove that, preferably using XP's own tools.

But afterwards he could use the easiest method I described above.

u shldnt haf use winxp to rewrite the mbr anymore.
can u get into suse9.1 and then post ur /boot/grub/menu.1st ?

There is a FAQ dedicated to WindowsXP/SuSE 9.1 dual booting problems on the SuSE section => http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=243931 <=
Have you read it?