*Walks into the LNU Meeting* LNU = Linux New User



Hello,

My Name is Sandfury, and I ... I ... I'm a new Linux User "Welcome Sandfury" Well Here is my dual boot blunder story:


My friend convinced me that I should run Linux, Being attuned to the awe of Microsoft for such a long time, I was unsure. But my curious nature took over and I was on my way to installing SuSE 9.1. So I got Partition Magic made a partition for Linux by resizing my Windows partition. With my new partition good to go, I threw in my SuSE CD and went to town. I selected english and it started telling me what I needed to do. I was excited yet nervous about what next was going to happen. I saw that it wanted to format my whole HD. Well I told it not to do that and I told it to install on the parition I made for it. It was crusing through the install and before I knew it. It was installed.

With a little smile creeping along my face I booted up for the first time using Linux. "I am using the KDE Interface" After seeing the Rather large Icons I desided to reboot into windows to use the messaging services so I could talkt to my friend who knew about linux on how to change the setting and what not. Well, SuSE made this nice new Boot screen for me. Linux, Windows, Failsafe.. I selected windows and the message that came next made me cry a little. "Failed to Load Operating System"

I freaked, I rebooted my PC 5 or 6 times each time hoping, praying, that the issue would just go away. Finally after seeing that the problem would not go away I booted into Linux, Go fig' the one I know nothing about would run. So I told myself not to panic, I will just format my CD with my XP CD rom and Start from Scratch no biggy I didnt lose anything important. I installed, at the end I reboted my PC...... "Failed to Load Operating System"

I started getting depressed. I didnt know what to do, When in windows I have a feeling of knowing the ins and outs of fixing it. But when the thing won't boot I simply do not know what to do. Well I tired to reinstall again. No Go. I load Linux. Freaking thing loaded with out any problems. What am I doing wrong I ask and why does Linux feel the the worst piece of spyware I have ever seen "Spyware being a pain in the ass thing that wont uninstall and still leaves a path of distruction even when it is uninstalled" "I work for a DSL Router Company .. I HATE Spyware"

So now it is day 3 and I have still not had any luck getting linux off my machine and windows loaded back up. I still want to dual boot to learn it but I need my games and my settings I feel good about And I have this weird thing about having my parts run smoothly.

So now I ask ye, what can I do ? Did I hose my MBR with this GRUB Boot thing ? Should I throw my HD out the window ? I have a Win XP CD, But I cant Opent he Manual Recovery thing for somereason. I am load the automated but it asks for a boot disk... I dont have a floppy drive. well at least not installed.... I have one and could plug it in. What can I do ? Please help me. I will try anything at this time. Something odd to point out right quick SuSE Renamed my 2nd HD windows/c do you think this had anything to do witht he fact my HD wont boot ? Does the MBR think that the 2nd HD is the c drive not and since it does not have windows on it it wont load ?


Thanks for you Help,

SuSE and Linux New User ....
Sandfury

PS: Sorry for the story, I thought I might show other new users that they are not the only ones as well.

ok sorry I didn't bother to fully read your post
When you created the partiton with partition magic did you by chance resized the partition where windows XP lives and did it from the left?(ie your linux partition is before the winxp one)
If you're able to get into Linux can you do "/sbin/fdisk -l" as root and post the output?
ah and also the content of /boot/grub/menu.lst (just "cat /boot/grub/menu.lst")

No when I did it the Linux Partition was after the Windows one. And since I have fdisked a few times there is just a Linux Partition now. I shall do the other thinkswhen I get home tonight ! Thanks
Again sorry for the Long Post.



Sandfury

It's quite likely that if you have been messing with your partitions the boot.ini file on the root of your Windows system partition will be configured incorrectly. Whilst during the Suse install grub will have pointed your Windows boot option to the correct partition, Windows itself does not know where it is.

If you can manage to get to the recovery console by booting from your XP cd, then run the command fixboot and it will sort itself out for you. Your MBR is fine, so leave that alone.

If this is the case I doubt Windows would have booted at all after you resized the partition, so don't get upset with Suse - It's good old fashioned user error I'm afraid. Look on the bright side - you won't do it again will you

As far as Windows goes, I dumped XP 18 months ago and went full time with Suse. Whilst I admin a lot of redhat and solaris stuff at work, it took me a good 6 months to get fully comfortable with it as a desktop platform. Since then I've never looked back - there's nothing I can do on Windows that I can't do just as easily if not better on Linux - except make it crash all the time perhaps... and yes, you can still use stupid MSN if you really want to.

Ahh - I didn't notice that bit... oh dear oh dear. You *might* be able to undelete the Windows partition using Partition Magic, but it's quite hit & miss in that respect to be honest. The best tool I've found for recovering partitions is Active Partition Recovery from http://www.partition-recovery.com/partition.htm

Try giving their demo a spin, it will tell you if it can recover the partition. Then you can decide whether to shell out and buy it, or whether you can live with the fact that you nuked your Windows partition and rebuild from scratch.

Who knows, perhaps it's a sign... your path away from the dark side

Welp, after all was said an done. That and a lot of bugging people at work if they knew anything about Linux someone recommended that I just make a Bootable Floppy with my HD's Utilities on it .... So at work I went to Maxtor and downloaded they utility... Today I learn the power of the Low Level Format.. I turned my HD into all 0's only took 4 hours but I am not talking to you on this forum with Windows fully recovered.. From now on if I want to play with Linux I will put the boot part on a floppy.



Thanks for your help all.
Sandfury

Well I hope after you fix things, you wont get nervous about SuSE and XP. I have a laptop w/ XP and just installed SuSE (yes I"m newbie too) and it runs perfect. I used Parition Magic to partion my drives and it all went perfectly.
Its fun to play with both. I even have 3 partitions. 1 NTFS, 1 fat32, 1 ext2.
I use the Fat32 to file transfer stuff between OS's. Soon as I can figure out how to get my SuSE on the internet, I will eventually reduce my fat32 part.

Anyways, Its good to explore and eventually I hope to hardly use XP unless I have to (for windows only related programs).

And I hear there is a XP emulator for Linux (even better!).

Dont give up!

Yeah I want to learn it as well, but it just bugged me that I could not config SuSE to use my Card Right. People tell me Linux is a pain in the butt to get going and config'ed but once is, it will run forever.

I am still going to try it again but this time I will have a friend help me config it. Being as he has done it before.

Same thing happened to me. Installed SuSE 9.1 & windows failed to boot. Got the message NTLDR missing. (There was no prob with suse 9.0)

Unable to get windows bootable, I had to reinstall windows on the partition suse created.
now it all works fine.

This appears to be a problem with SuSE 9.1

I have just had the same problem. I let the SUSE 9.1 cd repartition my (new) hard disk and the installation went fine. Well, mostly. But, on rebooting the pc, I found that I could no longer run Win XP, getting the message "NTLDR not found".
I have copied the ntldr and ntdetect.com files from the WinXP cd onto the root of the hard disk (ie, c:\) but no joy, no WinXP.
This is my first foray into the world of Linux so any help would be much appreciated.

I'm kindof a newbie too, but I have actually had some success with dual booting windows xp and suse 9.1. However, I'm running a RAID array for windows, so I had to use the NTLDR.

I did a "dd if=/dev/sda of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1" to get the bootsector in a file, transferred it to the windows partition, and pointed the win.ini to it with "C:\bootsect.lnx"=Linux

It worked...though I'm at a loss as to how to get linux to NOT see my windows partition ^.^ (evil raid array).

My experience with linux began last night (a real newbie!) but with success at dual booting. On a 40 gig hdd I formatted 25 gig as fat32 as XP loaded (someone told me that linux won't write to NTFS - is this true?). SuSE 9.1 was loaded into the remaining unpartioned 15 gig. In grub windows was set as the default as I still haven't sorted the internet connection and networking in suse and need to find how to run or replace msmoney. Otherwise goodbye windows! Dual boot works beautifully!

Well, good for you, geeb777. Dual booting can be tricky. My problem was solved by dissolving my VIA SATA RAID array (it was DRIVER based raid, funky, eh?). Linux is quite nice now.

Linux, with the current ntfstools cannot write to an NTFS partition. However, I read somewhere that Knoppix 3.4 has a 'captive-ntfs' feature, where one can specify certain Windows system files and write to that drive. Is this accurate, or even feasible, and if it can be done, how would one move that package to an installed distro?

Well, I have a new URL for you guys. http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/ This site has the info I was looking at. It apparently uses the ntoskrnl.sys and ntfs.sys to achieve full NTFS access.

The next question is... How does one force running of a script at boottime (i.e. running a custom mount script (mount.captive.ntfs))?

Hi,

regarding the Problems with dual boot and SuSE 9.1, using GRUB as Boot Manager, you shall take
a look on:

http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/0...booting91.html

The other option is to use the Windows Boot Manager for dual boot.