Suse 9.2 PRO won't boot without CD1 in drive!
 

Hope that someone can help me with this problem -

I was running Mandrake 10.1 Community on my Laptop, as a dual boot with Windows XP Home, Win XP as a 20gb partition 'C:\', and Linux partition the remaining 10gb.

I had no problems at all with that configuration, but Mandrake wasn't allowing me to see battery life, and didn't have the best drivers for a Radeon 9000 mobile chip, or Centrino processor [By the way, it is a BenQ Joybook 5000 if anyone is interested, I thought I should post it here rather than in the laptop section though!]

I then decided to wipe both Windows and Mandrake 10.1, and remove all of the partitions, then let Suse 9.2 PRO partition as it saw fit. I then realised that it would only boot as long as CD1 is in the CD-ROM drive, and I select 'Boot from Hard Disk'.

If CD 1 is not in the drive, I get an error along the lines of :

'Retry Hard Drive Boot 'H', Boot from Floppy 'F', or press Space to continue'.

If I press space, it attempts to boot over LAN, and then CD-ROM.

Oh, I don't have a floppy disc drive either :(

Any ideas? I've tried swapping GRUB [which I am currently using] for LILO, but that doesn't make a difference.

I've just installed Windows XP again, and now THAT won't boot either - I get an 'NTLDR NOT FOUND, PRESS ANY KEY TO RESTART'!!

Obviously as I can use Suse with the CD in the drive, it isn't the end of the world, but is a little inconvenient :)

Any recommendations would be most appreciated :)

Looks as though there's some problem with your MBR. You can check your partition table using a tool like FDisk or Partition Magic to correct the problem. You might not have set any partition to be the active partition.

Also go into the BIOS and check whether there is any problem with the boot configuration. Set the hard disk to be the 1st boot device.

If it doesn't boot when you install Windows, you can try the

fdisk /mbr

to clear your MBR and point to the correct active partition.

Also put the partition table you see in this thread so that the problem can be diagnosed.
Give any other error messages you see and report in this thread.

@harishankar:
Under XP, the command has actually been revised to 'fixboot'. I'm sure the old command would work, but I just thought I'd point that out.
The reason XP isn't booting is because the linux bootloader has superceded the default XP one, and I've found XP doesn't like that. While I know there's a way around that problem, I personally do not know what it is ^.^;
"Fixboot" will reset the MBR to the default XP bootup, which may possibly make your Suse install inacessible. (Unless you can use the CD as a bootdisk. I'm not too familiar with suse...)


Anyway! It seems to me that for some reason your bootloader is pointing to a file on the CD instead of the HD like it ought to. Much to my chagrin I'm a linux newbie and can't tell you how to correct that problem ^.^;;

Cheers for the help, I'll check it out when I get back from college!

Seems like a weird problem, I always assumed that when I installed Windows XP [or any other version TBH] in the past, that it automatically made a certain partition active and rewrote the MBR :S

Hopefully the above ideas will work, I'll let you know how I get on :)

Thanks for the help!!

I managed to get Fdisk from the 98SE and that sorted it, seems I didn't have an active partition - although I'm not sure why!

SuSE boots without the CD now, I did try running a Triboot earlier [98SE, XP Pro and SuSE 9.2], but that seemed to mess things up again [XP installer from HDD wouldn't boot, didn't give any error message just froze after the BIOS test screen]!

Took off 98 and am reinstalling XP, seems fine now :)

Thanks once again :)

DOH!!!!


I assumed that because I could get into XP from GRUB, and also 'start' the SuSE boot process, that SuSE would actually boot. In fact, it seems to be booting, then throws up the following :
--------------------------------------------------------------------

BIOS EDD facility v0.16 2004-Jun-25, 1 devices found
Start Unicode mode done
Loading console font lat9w-16-psfu -m trivial \033(K done

fsck failed. Please repair manually and reboot. The root
file system is currently mounted read-only . To remount it
read-write do:

bash# mount -n -o remount,rw /

Attention: Only CONTROL-D will reboot the system in this
maintenance mode. shutdown or reboot will not work.

Give root password for login: _
----------------------------------------------------------------------

So I login as root, and then I am confronted by

(none):" #

and then I type in the 'mount -n -o remount,rw /' stated above.

I then get

reiserfs : enabling write barrier flush mode

and then back to the

(none):" #

prompt. If I restart at that point, I get the same error message next time I boot!

Any ideas?

I tried running fsck from the prompt, but that exits with

fsck.reiserfs /dev/hda2 failed (status 0x10). Run manually!

:S

Regards,

Ben

Sorry for the treble posting, feel free to delete the above if necessary but I think they help set the scene :)

Anyway, I just noticed that this fsck error was mentioned in another thread, so far I've :

Rebuilt the superblock :S
and I am now rebuilding the tree :S

If that doesn't work I'll let you know. Knowing my luck it'll do more harm than good, but it looks interesting, and seems to have found loads of errors :)