Hello People

Firstly must say that this is a really good forum. This is my first post so here we go. Basically I have a laptop (yeah good for me lol) compaq presario 2500. I have WinXP on it. What I wanted to do was install Redhat 9.0 and SuSe9.1. I Used partition magic to partiton the hard drive 40gb (1st partition winxip 18gb, redhat 10gb, SuSe 10gb, Swap 1gb, Vfat 1gb in this order).

I installed Redhat on the second partiton hda5 it went all fine (obviously had to cofigure the nofirewire issue on boot up and pcmcia issue on shutdown using this forum great got it fixed. Everything fine there WinXP and RH9 boot up and work sweet.

The problem I am having is when I loaded SuSe I selected the third partition hda6. The install went well. When getting to the GRUB menu and select WinXP or RH9 they are fine and boot up but when booting SuSe I get an error

'Boot Partition'

Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition ... and the it prompts to
'press enter to continue...' and goes back to the grub menu.

This error means the following

Error 17 : Cannot mount selected partition
This error is returned if the partition requested exists, but the
filesystem type cannot be recognized by GRUB.


So what I did is loaded RH9 and mounted the SuSe filesystem and go and look into grub.conf and menu.lst files and they both seem fine, when i go into RH9 grub file it does not have the SuSe information at all.

But here is the thing it uses the SuSe grub menu. The way i know this is the options it gives me at the menu, there are 4 options

RH9
WinXP
SuSe
Memory Test

(In this order)

The last 2 options are not in the RH9 grub file so I know it is not using the RH9 grub (and also I installed SuSe 2nd and so that would have NOT overwritten but defaulted to the SuSe Grub.

So how do I fix this error 17 problem?.

-------------------------

Also Now when I load RH9 it comes up with errors on Boot. It goes something like this

something vfat [failed]
(perhaps iptable or kernel needs to be updated).

iptables-restore -h iptables-restore --help
(perhaps iptable or kernel needs to be updated).
[failed]

I have to obviously do something to the kernel as this needs some updating.

Hope somebody can help me.

Cheers

Guys..........and Gals

I have not failed. I have just
found 10,000 ways that don't work

I found this link in a forum, hope it helps:
http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/05/fhassel_windows_not_booting91.html

Strange... the link doesn't work??
Just type or copy/paste in the adressfield!

Thanks Pingu

Umm looked at the page I dont think this is an issue with the system understanding how big the disk is. The issue is really with grub.conf or menu.lst. I am sure I will
have to alter change something in the grub file.

The thing with the pointing to the right partition isn't an issue as I could correct that at the grub prompt.

The issue is that the grub can see the filesystem but cant mount it.

Thanks



.....P.S. sorry for sending this to all the different forums do apologise rookie mistake.

It sounds strange that your system is using Suse grub bootloader but it cannot boot Suse... This may sound strange, but it looks like RH9 is using Suse's entries to boot RH9.

This is how I configured my two systems...
I have installed on my desktop and laptop RH9, Suse 9.1 pro and XP, and I'm using RH9 grub bootloader. If you want to go this route, install RH9 grub and boot into Suse using the installation cd, and go through the initial first steps of the installation. Before the installation begins, you will have about 4 options i.e. new installation and so on. Choose "boot an installed system" (not sure of the wording); this should boot Suse without a problem. Then go to yast>system>Boot Loader Configuration, click on Available Selections, click on Linux (if it was not changed, it should be the default Suse boot entry). Copy exactly the "kernel" and "initrd" lines into RH9 grub.conf. This worked for me on both desktop and laptop.

This is my (RH9) grub.conf (desktop)...

...
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd1,4)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-31.9)
root (hd1,4)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-31.9 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.20-31.9.img
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-6)
root (hd1,4)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-6 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.20-6.img
title SuSE
kernel (hd1,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hde2 vga=0x305 splash=silent desktop resume=/dev/hde1 showopts
initrd (hd1,1)/boot/initrd
title WindowsXP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

p.s. Eventhough XP is on a different harddrive than RH9 and Suse, it should not make a difference if you just enter exactly the kernel and initrd lines from Suse into RH9 grub.conf. All three boot without errors.
hope this helps...