I didn't per-se have a partition problem after installing SUSE 9.1 on a Windows box -- I could still boot Windows -- I had Linux installed on a totally separate physical Disk Drive.

What I did notice however was when I used Partition Magic on Windows it showed PARTITION BAD on the hard disk where I'd installed SUSE 9.1

I got round the problem by creating a Linux partition with Partition Manager on the Windows Box and then when installing SUSE 9.1 selected the option DON'T FORMAT the partition.

This seems to work OK --but you need to set up the partitions on Windows -- not the ideal solution.

I'm using SUSE 9.1 PRO

(BTW I didn't have this problem of "hosed partitions" on Suse 9.0 Pro)

My Windows partitoins are NTFS and I've had SP2 applied to Windows XP.

My gut feel is that this is related to SP2 -- An earlier installation on a Windows XP box didn't cause this problem.

I don´t know if I am the only one who lost a complete partition ( FAT32 ) when installing SuSE 9.1 pro on my laptop with already existing 40 GB free space for Linux.

Before I installed:
- 80 GB hda
- hda1: 25 GB NTFS ( Windows XP )
- hda2: 20 GB FAT32 ( data storage container for both, Windows and Linux )
the rest was not partitioned at all.

During the installation:
- added hda3: 100MB ext2 ( /boot )
- added hda5: 20 GB reiserfs ( / )
- added hda6: 10 GB reiserfs ( /home )
- added hda7: 512 MB swap ( Swap Partition )
- don´t do anything with hda1 and hda2

The installation hang up during the writing of the partition table ( oh oh )

After reboot I had:
- hda1 was there, but reported as damaged from windows
- hda2 was completely gone ( even Partition magic didn´t see the partition anymore, and several recovery tools didn´t show the partition )
- had nine ( 9 !!!! ) partitions with 3 TeraByte ( TB !! ) each !! ( oh ooooh )
- SuSE did not install, and I could not delete the 9 partitions during a new try...
- Windows did boot but reported an error with the filesystem.

I do not blame SuSE for this, it could have been a simple HD collapse or something, I don´t know.
Like I said, I was able to delete the 9 giant partitions with fdisk ( bootet from a Slackware CD ), created new partitions and installed SuSE without any problems.

Anyway, after a complete new installation of Windows and SuSE, the Laptop is up and running very fine

Like I said, I will not blame no product for this, because I do not know what caused the damage.
I just wanted to report it.

Raphael M
thanks for the kind thoughts you are a saint?

OTHERS
I have taken various posts and posted some fixes for the dual boot issue in my grub file.The solution is unrelated to grub.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=237511

I have just installed 9.1 Pro and have had no problems duel booting, all I was told was to make sure the hard drive was set to LBA.

trackrat

dual boot to your mdk, or do you mean to XP.....no problems

This is a 2.6+ Kernel issue, not SuSE. All the distro's i've used with 2.6 kernel do this on my computer. Hopefully it will be fixed eventually.

aus9 I meant dual booting XP & SuSE.

thanks trackrat


KohlyKohl
You may be right but users are still posting they have dual boot problems. I am trying to minimise those posts that reflect on grub and unfortunately grub is the default to those distros....afaik.

Hi all
There is another simple pitfall I have seen where using partition magic a guy put SUSE before his XP system, ie Hda1 / , Hda2 Swap, Hda3 XP.
All Windows Oses use Hda1 (windows C: ) for their pagefile (linux swap), if Hda1 is formatted in a file system unreadable by windows (ie ReiserFS), then Windows (XP) is a no go.

Mad Malc

I know how some of you must feel with this dual-booting problem. I spent hours trying to find a solution for the past 3 or 4 months.Anyway i want to inform you that the problem does not exist anymore with the new SUSE 9.2 version. It sets up easily and i can at last dual boot winXP Pro + winXp 64 bit and Suse 9.2 64 bit .The problem with the sound some of you refer in other sections of the forums is fixed, KDE 3.3 is a charm with a nice theme manager and everything works fasts and stable!

yeah you can change your swap drive to another patition in windows. Also the dual booting in 9.2 has not totally been fixed, I had it happen to me. Also KDE still is very inferior to Gnome in many ways.

KohlyKohl, i am so sorry you still have problems with Suse 9.2. I have bought the full version and no the update and it worked fine.I have been tried to set up the 9.1 for so long and every time the windows boot sector became a mess.This time it worked fine and i thought to share it with all of you, who had the same problems as me. Anyway, I hope, at least some of us have solved the problem

For aus9

The multi boot problem has been around for a while. What happened is that SuSE used the "parted" program that contained a bug for it's 9.2 issue. This only happens when one used a HD drive that goes over the 1024 cyclinder limit. My HD is 160GB so it hit me. My MS Win XP is just not recognized so all data there is unavailable. SuSE has one fix on it's web site but it didn't work for me so I have been waiting for the 9.2 to come out. This 9.2 edition supposedly has a good parted program or such that is a cure. There are several places here on LinuxQuestion.org that contain verbage about the problem and some fixes. I'm just being careful since I believe that SuSE is on a 6 month cycle right now. There was a problem in 8.0 where if one had two HD controllers SuSE 8.0 would only recoginze one HD. I don't know if that dual controller problem was fixed on not but I believe someone mentioned it was in the 8.2 edition.
Hope this helps.

For mimika:
How many HD's and what size are on your system ? see note above about 1024.

I have the boot problem on a hard drive with only 512 cylinders, it has nothing to do with that. All it has to do with is writting the wrong partition table to the hard drive. Read/Write modes deal with the difference in geometries to attain better file management and many other things.

For KohlyKohl:
You are correct "writting the wrong partition table to the hard drive" but this function I believe is done by parted. However if everyone with a HD has the problem, as you indicate with a 512 cyl HD, then there are many more systems/users that will not recognize XP to the tune of a flood. Can this expected large number of users be correct?