Hi (from a complete Linux newbie) -

I recently bought a new 160G HD for my machine which up to now has had Win98/Win2000 dual-booting. The idea was to do a complete reinstall of Win98 and Win2000, and then install the copy of SUSE 9.1 Personal that came with the last copy of PC Pro. Well, it seemed to go well, with me using the NT boot loader to boot LILO. I was enjoying the KDE desktop with its pretty picture of a riverside, the Konqueror program, and the fact that my desktop restored itself when I booted back into Linux. I was also able to run Win98. But when I tried to boot Win2000, it booted up with an error message saying it was unable to find the Win2000 kernel. Now, I found that this is a common problem with the 2.6 kernel + the version of parted used by the SUSE installer, and I dutifully burned my ISO image (what a waste of space!!) of the fix. Unfortunately, the so-called fix didn't work! It said that my partitions were fine, when they certainly were not. I was upset.

Subsequently, I have swapped the HD master/slave jumpers around again, and am booting Win2000 from the original disk. Happily, I have Partition Magic 8, and I thought that I could simply fix the partitions using this tool. Unfortunately, it seems that it is not to be - Win2000 sees the other disk as being drive D (my existing primary HDD is partitioned into C: (Win98) and F: (Win2000) - there having been two other HDDs in my system until recently). So it looks as if it is goodbye SUSE installation. And my experimental deletion of drive D: seems to have killed it off for good. Whoops!

Now, I am willing to try again (third time lucky, and all that). Can any of the gurus here suggest how I can:

* Install SUSE 9.1 on the secondary HDD (now I have decided to keep my Win2000/Win98 installation on the primary HDD).
* Keep the partition tables valid for both Win2000 and Linux.
* Allow Linux to use the range of 138G to 160G which the BIOS doesn't support.
* Allow me to boot into Linux using the same Win2000 boot loader mechanism I used before.


As a further note, I was wondering whether the SUSE 9.1 Personal installallation is severely limited. There seemed to be a whole load of utilities I have seen mentioned, such as fdisk, sfdisk which aren't installed by SUSE.

I can't wait until I get this all working. I'm looking forward to doing some serious programming. Being able to change the source code, let alone look at it, is a dream come true.

--
Mark

It's all about the disk geometry...
Unlike for Linux, it needs to be a 100% correct to work for NT.
You have to add the correct size yourself.
This article is made for fedora, but will work for SuSE as well:
http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/