Last week I installed Suse 9.1's 64 bit version on my second hard SATA harddrive. I got tired of not having drivers for anything, like my ATI Radeon, so I decided to install the 32 bit version this morning.

Unfortunately, Windows can't see my second drive, because it is not a MS format. So, I couldn't reformat the drive. YAST told me that the install might fail, and so it did.

I removed the partition, using partition commander, but I still couldn't install. Worryingly, it could not mount my Linux parititon (no errors on the swap partition). I tried to continue, and clearly messed up my file system. After further flailing about, I can no longer boot my machine. All I get is the grub prompt. If I try to boot, it tells me "Kernel must be loaded before booting".

I can boot using the Suse CD. HOw do I reformat my Linux drive without windows, and how do I get windows back?

Best way to fix that is get yourself a windows 98 startup disk put it in the floppy drive and start the computer after it has started typ fdisk/mbr and that will fix the mbr!

Good luck......I think if you have an xp disk you can do it from the cd but this has always worked for me when I used to use windows even xp.

fdisk the Linux/Unix command, or DOS? I.e., do I do this from a Linux rescue disk, or a Windows? I have Symantic rescue disk, which found a problem with my Windows disk, so I'm about to try a reboot. Should I boot into windows or Linux?

Use a startup disk, like win 98 floppy. Boot without cdrom support don't need it for this. when you come to a: after ful boot type "fdisk/mbr" and your master boot record should be fixed.

That would be a DOS command, then. Sadly, I don't have a rescue floppy.

After running System works, I now get something telling me to boot off of a floppy, which means it eliminated GRUB, or fixed the MBR, but did not get windows to be bootable. I can still see windows, and I can restore a Ghost I made of the boot partition, perhaps that is the way I have to go.

Do you have a computer you can get online with? you can get a boot floppy at http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm . then you would just have to use a program like rawrite in windows to make the floppy bootable.

Thanks, you. You've been a great help!

(I've been posting using my lap top, so I should have no trouble making a floppy. Thank God I spent the extra few bucks for a floppy drive!)

Hey, while downloading dos, I dug through some old drawers and found an old win 98 partition magic disk. Oddly, it has no touble with the Linux partition, but tells me there is a problem with the windows drive.

And I haven't found fdisk on it yet. Argghh. But, I did at that site.

I got it! I never have managed to get a working version of fdisk, but I did manage to get Norton System Works to make my windows paritition bootable. It has some good utilities, for that world. Now, I'd better update my Ghost, and get back to getting my second drive to work.

Glad it worked out for ya! Good luck with linux (if you try it again).

You saved the day, if nothing else you gave me the confidence that the problems could be fixed. Thanks.

I've got the 32 bit version of Suse 9.1 pro installed now, it took a few iterations to fix the partitions on that side. (I deleted all that I could of the 64 bit using good ol' rm -rf - 10 years ago I was pretty good on Unix. I then went with the default install to minimize problems, and then did a fix install. The first install finally deleted the 64 bit main partition and created a working new one. The second fixed the swap partition.) One weirdness that took a few hours to figure out and remedy is that Yast does not install the full kernel by default, so I couldn't upgrade my sound drivers, which expected the full kernel. Not being sure what to select in Yast, I finally just installed another gigabyte of development tools and KDE.

I won't give up on Linux this easily. I'm nothing if not persistent. Heck, I've lived with Windows for seven years, I'd better be able to put up with a few week learning curve.