Hello, i was trying to install SuSE 10.1, but after countless attempts cd 2 would not load, so i decided to try 10.0. However the grub boot loader comes up first before the cdrom even has a chance to boot, even though the bios is set to boot cd rom first....
I cannot bring up the recovery console in a windows xp cd, because i cant get the cd rom to boot, and i do not have a 3.5 floppy.
I have 10.1 text only installed on my other machine, so i can still access the kernal:

I was reading and i tried /boot/grub/menu.lst thinking mabye i could edit the boot loader and make it load the cdrom, however i get permission denied...

I am in root, why am i not able to access this file? Also is it even possible to load the windows xp recovery cd so i can fixmbr from the grub bootloader?
Any advice would be extremely helpful!
Thanks

This could be a problem with the CD or the CD drive.
This makes me very suspicious of your CD drive. You were initially having problems reading CD's, now it won't boot off a CD. If you go ahead and let the thing boot off the harddrive, can you read CD's THEN? This sounds potentially like a drive problem to me, Grub has nothing to do with it. I suspect your BIOS is set to boot from CD first, but doesn't because it can't tell a CD is present (bad drive?), so it continues on to the next boot option which is probably the harddrive, and thus you see Grub.

You might try blowing some compressed air through your CD drive to clean it out, on the off chance you just have a dust bunny in there blocking the lens. Also make sure the CD's you are trying to use are clean and have only minimal superficial scratches, if any. And are inserted correctly in the drive. I've had more than one occassion where I put in a CD and it wasn't seen until after I removed it and reinserted it. Some drives seem more sensitive to accurate square-on insertion of the CD's, while other drives let you slam the things in there all crooked and off center but they manage to straighten them out and get them spun up somehow.

Do you have to hit F2 or something like that to recognize the boot order? Some commercial systems (laptops, etc.) tend to "disable" booting from anything besides the hard drive.

Well i goofed up and tried to delete the whole partition grub was on with little success... now i just keep getting invalid partition...

yes i do have the bios set to boot the cdrom first, i have to hit del and go into setup to change boot order

Im gonna try to replace my cdrom drive (i have a bunch of them lying around) however i do not believe this is the problem... Now i believe im gonna have a real tough time trying to get this thing to boot a cd with an (invalid partition table)

Do you also have Windows on this box? If so, I think you can try a repair install of XP and then start your install of SUSE 10.0 after that. I know that the installer used with XP does just fine even with new (blank) hard drives.

A partition table on your harddisk has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with booting FROM A CD. You don't even need to have a harddrive installed to boot FROM A CD.
Why did you do that? "with little success" ... It actually sounds like you were successful in deleting grub's partition. So the bootcode that grub installed in your MBR is trying to pass control up to the grub partition (which you wiped out), and thus it's reporting "invalid partition".

I would step back and take a breath before making your next move. Think about what has happened, and come up with a plan to recover (hopefully that's still possible at this point). Do some reading on how systems boot and what is accessed at each point in the process (BIOS, CD-ROM, FLOPPY, HDD, MBR, bootcode, partition table, grub's menu.lst, etc.) Deleting your Linux boot partition (i.e., "grub's partition") to fix a non-booting CD problem was maybe not the wisest choice.

oh yes agreed that was a big mistake however i used a 4.3gig hard drive as a slave to the master and it did something that help me recover my hard drive. Everythings working out at the moment