OKay, I have to admit I am not a Linux n00b but this question is so bad, I feel like one. Not to bore anyone with my BG, but the first Distro I installed was Slackware .9 years ago...

But, like a lot of people the lure of Windows and steady work pulled me away from exploring this wonderful OS to it's full potential.

With that being said, for the past year or two I have been dabbling in finding the right "Desktop Distro" to satisfy my needs, and more importantly to keep my wife happy. My end goal is to finally dump XP & Windows for good (or at least try really hard).

I have a single-drive system with 3 partitions. A "Store" drive where I keep all my lovely goodies (NTFS) and a WinXP system partition. The third, which I guess is 2 partitions in itself is there for a Linux Distro.

Now, this isn't a "Which Distro is best" thread it's a "how do I fix what I screwed up" thread.

When I installed SuSE 9.2, it installed flawlessly. No bugs, hangups, nothing. I set the default in the GRUB/Boot Loader option to "Windows" as my default... Hey, gotta make sure the wife see's her pretty Windows, right?

Anyway, I was done messing around in Linux and being a happy puppy I decide to switch over to XP to put things back in place... and bam... NT cannot find blah blah blah. No boot!

It looked like it was either pointing somewhere it shouldn't be, or SuSE decided to blow away my Windows partitions. Since I was just looking at the NTFS partitions a second ago while in SuSE, I know that wasn't the case. I wanted to make sure the wife could boot in the morning, so I quickly booted off the XP cd and went into recovery mode. I figured I'll just play with it later and so I did a FIXMBR & FIXBOOT on it. Well, that of course killed GRUB but what remained was no booting to anything at all.

I Realized I should have rebuilt my BOOT.INI because the reference in BOOT.INI referred to partition position, which since I had 2 additional ones broke the sequence, and instead of position 2 it was now position 4.

Well crap, so it wasn't Linux after all. St00p1d me

So now how do I get GRUB back? I haven't had this problem before and hadn't installed a boot loader since LILO and Slackware days, since then i've been a distro monster... Having a wife and 2 kids keeps me away from "scratch" Linux anytime soon

Anyway,

Do I boot off the DVD and go into recovery mode, try and run YAST and have it recreate the GRUB/Boot Loader? or is there another way?

Sorry for the ^^^^ I just had to tell someone.

Help me <insert your name>, your my only hope.

Your on the right track. Boot the CD or DVD. When it comes up, it has 4 option. New, Update, something and Repair is what I think they are. You want to repair. WHen that is selected, you can auto-repair which checks about 7 things, or selectively repair. If I were you, I'd selectively repair and just do the boot loader. It will try to repair GRUB for you. That should be all it takes.

Terrific, thanks for replying.

I am actually in SuSE right now (and loving every minute of it : )

What I ended up doing was starting the install process, and it gave me options, and had it do a repair and boom, fixed it. Sounds like the same thing you were telling me to do.

I sincerely appreciate you taking the time and replying to me!

Now with my big problem, getting my TV Tuner card to work!

Cheers,

Christopher