how do i boot in to.....
 

:confused: i have been trying to install suse linux 9 pro, along side xp, but end up wiping my hard drive and am unable to boot into either. so i formated my hard drive and installed suse first, on "C" with a swap space, i then tryed to install xp on "g" but now i can't boot in linux. i have partition magic and can see linux but can't work out how to get into it.......at total newbe....:confused:

Dual booting SuSE and windows
 

Windows must be installed first. This is because Windows doesn't understand dual booting and overwrites the MBR silently and without asking permission. So, if you do it in this order it should worK:

1) Partition Magic and creat 1 partition for windows and however many you want for Linux
2) Install Windows
3) Install SuSE

Should be all you need.

XP needs to have a small boot drive on the first partition, If some older linux geek is out there, check this info...!!!:D

My suggestion:
Make a small bootdrive as "c" or /dev/hda1 as /boot (windows needs this for it's bootloader!!!)
Make the linux root as /dev/hda2 ( invisible to M$ )
Make the windows partition as /dev/hda3 FORMATTED AS FAT32, althougth suse 9 can read NTFS, but you need kernel 2.6 to write to it.
Make the swap partition as 1024MB, last as /dev/hda4

Hope you can understand it.:rolleyes:

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Finally knowing what dependancy hell is :scratch:
A big :newbie: !!!

yeah MS doesn't play well with others...go figure...

Netizen

so basicaly i have done the wrong way about........

Weren't there something about not making swap bigger then 500 megs?

I think I saw that somewhere...

I don't know if Suse is like RH9, because I have a dual boot W2K-RH9 and with Partition Expert, it took a lot of time to me to have both work together successfully. In the end (after Suse installation), you have to tell Windows you have another system (I copied the Linux boot to the c-Windows drive and modified Windows boot.ini:I don't know if WXP has the equivalent of boot.ini ). If your BIOS is not too old, the 1024 limitation is obsolete. Good luck.

Win2K and SuSE
 

I didn't have to do anything to Win2K other than resize the partition it's in. SuSE handled everything else. If it matters, SuSE uses GRUB rather than LILO.

-There is HOW TO dual boot. But what you have to do is :
1)with Partition Magic, create the partitions you need for XP and SuSe (at least 2 partitions)
2)install XP
3)install SuSe, but during SuSe installation, you have to create at least the /boot and the swap partitions (preferably /boot, swap and /).Tell SuSe NOT TO USE the MBR (if SuSe is like RH, it asks you where to put the boot partitions).CREATE A BOOT DISKETTE. Write down the partition used by the SuSe boot partition (you can check it later with fdisk -l).
4)after SuSe installation, copy the boot sectors of SuSe on a floppy diskette using dd if=/dev/hdxx of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512, count=1, xx being your linux boot partition
5)copy the bootsect.lnx to your XP-c partition and change the boot.ini XP file to take it into account. Reboot the system and you normally have to chosse betwden XP and SuSe. You may change the GRUB later as you like.

It shouldn't be a problem. Personally I've got 1024 as swap, which is much more than I usually need, but what do you do if you're running an extreme RAM-eater of an application, run out of memory, and the app still wants another 600MB?

Thanks every one...this forum has a quick response...cheers..
i think i'll just buy a portable hard drive and go through usb...will that work. and would it be easyer than all this for a complete newbe.