Ok, here is the problem, i have two hd's, the first has winxp on it and is working fine. I have nothing on the second drive apart from some general crap, i.e. movies, apps, etc, its mainly just for storage.

I wanted to install suse 8.2 so i used partition magic to create two more partitions on the second drive, a 14GB EXT and 500MB for swapfiles.

I then installed suse onto those partitions and all was going well.

Then after it restarted, it wouldnt boot anymore, it just came up with GRUB and hangs there!

I can access suse but only going through using the boot-cd. I managed to use fdisk /fixmbr so i can now load xp again.

The problem is everything works its just i can boot into any of them easily!

both os's are fine, its just the bootloader.

HD with windows = hda1
HD with other misc files = hdb1
HD with suse = hdb5
HD with something(i think its the swap file) = hdb6

I tried to configure the bootloader in suse using the yast control thing but it wanted to know where the bootloader is and i dont have a clue!!

im pretty new to linux so be gentle!!

Since you said you used fdisk /fixmbr, then most likely, your MBR is on /dev/hda, the windows partition. I'm not a Grub user, so not quite sure, but when you installed Suse, you should have told it to install Grub in the MBR and it should have created a dual boot setup, at least with the Windows partition.

Get back into Suse and as root, type in a console, man grub to see how you can add it back to the MBR.

I'm not a Suse user either so if this not quite right, maybe someone else can offer a better solution.

BittaBrotha is on the right track.

Suse does have a boot loader configuration utility.

At a command line, switch to root:
su

Put in your password and then run:
YaST

The boot loader configuration is in the system section.

i have tried the yast bootloader config before but nothing works still, i have tried with LILO and GRUB, with LILO i get a screen full of 70 and with GRUB i just get the word GRUB and it stalls on that

would it be because i have it on a second disk but at the end of it, not at the start.

I have loads of windows files then the partition is after that on the drive, should i maybe make the partition at the start?

To use the grub bootloader, you should put it on the MBR of /dev/hda. Make sure there is an entry in the bootloader configuration that has /dev/hda1 pointing to the windows install and the /dev/hdb5 pointing to the suse install.

Then, make sure that the bootloader configuration program applies the changes.

That should do it.

Where the partition is on the hard drive really does not matter, just as long as the bootloader configuration is pointing to the right partition.

Hope this helps!