Need to take my system back, and am nervous
 

Hi, I need to give some pre-able to outline where I am and how.

I bought a kick ass dream system to house all my data, films and music and wanted to also start to really get my head around linux.

It was delivered with Vista 64 Home Premium, so I installed from a boot disk ubuntu, didnt take then i had a system I could only boot from boot disk. Then installed open suse, and after a day pulling my hair out managed to get a duel boot system working, however lost access to the ubuntu.

My new system has 3 x 750GB HDDs and I am left with just over a 1TB as my C drive is partitioned to 400GB which is my primary where Windows boots from, and my L drive which is an NTFS 700GB available drive. My D drive is recognised by windows but is not formatted but windows tells me that it only has 80Gb.

So in a nut shell I dont have access to a complete dirve 700-750GB and 300-350Gb from my primary just to boot into open suse.

Now I have Yast2 to look at my partitions and frankly dont understand what I am seeing. More over I am not clear how I can identify where SUSE begins and ubuntu ends. I am worried if I delete all linux and extended partitions I will also loose my boot manager and therefor windows.

In an ideal world I would like a system that I can boot into ubuntu, opensuse and Vista, but will take a duel boot but with my hard disk space back. Ideally I would like to split my remaining space into some sharable fat32 space, reduce the linux partition to 50GB and have the rest as usable NTFS sapce.

Advise and support would be warmly and graciously appreciated.

If I am correct opensuse is running , if so ask for terminal and become root
First run the command fdisk -l(L lower case) it gives all the partitions of you're drives what is on it
Second vi /boot/grub/menu.lst it tells which OS are booting now .
Post both out come and we might be able to tell if Ubuntu is still there or on with partition it can be installed.

I would rather think that the SUSE installation did overwrite the Master Boot Record (MBR) and the GRUB booting stuff, so it's quite possible that Ubuntu is still around (depending on the SUSE install settings), but not available in the boot options list.

Run 'df -h' and '/bin/fdisk -l' and compare to see if fdisk lists more Linux type partitions then can be seen in the df list. You can then mount any such hidden partition to some local directory and see what it contains.

Hi ronlau9, Info as requested

Disk /dev/sda: 750.1 GB, 750156374016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x52135696

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 51821 416252151 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 51822 72377 165116070 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 72378 91201 151203780 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 72378 90432 145026756 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 90433 91201 6176961 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 750.1 GB, 750156374016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x52135692

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 52800 424114172 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 52801 91201 308456032+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 89973 91201 9871911 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb6 52801 55411 20972794+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb7 55412 89972 277611201 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdc: 750.1 GB, 750156374016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x521356aa

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 91202 732571648 7 HPFS/NTFS

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

initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.25.5-1.1-pae

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe -- openSUSE 11.0 - 2.6.25.5-1.1
root (hd2,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25.5-1.1-pae root=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST3750840AS_5QD4PQC3-part7 showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off noresume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 edd=off x11failsafe vga=0x31a
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.25.5-1.1-pae

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-9-generic (/dev/sda5)###
title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-9-generic (/dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst
configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: openSUSE 11.0 - 2.6.25.5-1.1 (/dev/sdb6)###
title openSUSE 11.0 - 2.6.25.5-1.1 (/dev/sdb6)
root (hd2,5)
configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst
configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows 1###
title windows 1
rootnoverify (hd2,6)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows 2###
title windows 2
rootnoverify (hd2,6)
chainloader (hd2,0)+1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows 3###
title windows 3
rootnoverify (hd2,6)
chainloader (hd1,0)+1

title Vista New
rootnoverify (hd2,6)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1

maresmasb, in responce to your comment

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb7 261G 2.8G 245G 2% /
udev 4.0G 160K 4.0G 1% /dev
/dev/sda1 397G 112M 397G 1% /windows/C
/dev/sdb1 405G 315G 91G 78% /windows/D
/dev/sdc1 699G 449G 250G 65% /windows/E
sac@linux-1pux:~> /bin/fdisk -l
bash: /bin/fdisk: No such file or directory

Not sure what to do next guys...

You're Ubuntu is on sda 5 sda 6
Normally you can format sda5 and sda6 without problemns no guaranty
We can try to boot Ubuntu
See the Ubuntu lines in you're menu.lst and make it as follows
title Ubuntu
root(hd0,1)
kernel/boot/vmilinuz-2.6.27-9-generic root /dev/hd0,4 ro single
initrid /boot/initrid.img-2.6.17-09 generic

Use a real linux editor like kwrite , pico ,nano ,gedit
Hope it works

/dev/sda2 might also belong to Ubuntu, and there is still a stray Linux partition on /dev/sdb6 that is not used by the running SUSE system.

Mount all the unmounted Linux type partitions to /mnt and see what they contain. The directory hierarchy should give a good hint about the partitions purpose.

How do I do that?

What about on the commandline man mount ?