This has been very painfull indeed. Went a searching last night. Not really one single method of fixing this problem out there. Eventually found something on the Red Hat support pages and tried booting to a rescue CD and followed the commands given:

sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda

or

sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread --force -H255 /dev/hda

Still the same, will probably have to give up soon after 3 days of trying various methods.

Ouch.

Kix

since you are not having much luck, you may want to try zeroing the mbr and then starting over again but using an independent partition tool that I mention in my grub howto.

2) Be aware that zeroing the mbr is a little nasty....there are posts on it, you need to have a way of getting out of it and if you a new to mucking around with mbrs you may want to read how to backup your mbr first.

3) for the brave, assuming you have backups etc

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

CHANGE hda to sda 9 if you have a scsi or sata
or if you are zeroing another drive to hdb hdc // sdb sdc etc

I have read some post saying that windows sometimes zeros mbr on each rewrite so this may help.

aus9

Thanks for the response. I did try to zero the mbr using the method you gave, as after running the sfdisk command this is suggested in the sfdisk dialogue. This actually made the problem worse. Prior to zeroing the mbr I could view the contents of the primary XP partition, after zeroing it, the first partition (hda1) was listed but I could not view the contents. The other two fat32 partitions were intact.

I've since zeroed the entire drive (losing everything ), and re-installed XP

It is a shame, as some people have pointed out, that this can get so messy and is quite difficult. I am surprised that a quick and easy rescue was not made avilable from at least one distro.

Many thanks though to the efforts of the community as usual. This problem is quite well documented but there still does not seem to be a 'cure all', all solutions are slightly different.

Cheers

kix

It's all working brilliant for me. In the installation it just came up with a slider. I took XP down to 15GB and thus gave SuSE a healthy 15 also.

It's recognised all my hardware too... Configured my Graphics card to cope with 3D by merely clicking a single check box...

Heh, Toshiba Satellite. It has two stickers just below the keyboard:
Designed for Microsoft Windows XP
Powered by SuSE Linux

Lol

Hi People,

Am completely new to Linux and am in a really desperate situation....

Had windows XP prof running on my hard disk and decided to install SUSE Linux professional 9.2. Being the complete novice that I am I allowed my brother (Big Mistake) who I thought was proficient with Linux/windows dual boots to install SUSE 9.2.

Problem is now when I select windows at the boot up screen the screen goes blank apart from a message at the top which says :

rootnoverify (hd1,0)
Chainloader +1

Unfortunately all my work stuff in on windows and need to get windows working again.

My hard disk configuration is as follows :

160gb consisting of :
hdb1 - windows
hdb4 - Linux
hdb5 - NTFS partitioned storage space.

80gb :
hda5 - NTFS storage space

Am using GRUB as the boot program.

Found the problem on your forum of dual booting with SUSE 9.1 and thought I might be having the same problem, so thought I would follow the instructions and made the floppy disk as requested. When the floppy was inserted the message on the screen read " no new drivers found". So it seems that the problem with 9.1 was fixed on 9.2 and therefore my situation is different.

Can anyone shed any light on my problem as I really need windows up and running.

Any help or assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Please bear in mind that I am a complete newbie to Linux and do not have any command knowledge

Cheers

if you see that message that means grub is in your mbr, but which one?
I suspect your bios boot order is hdb then hda and mbr for hdb has grub in it.
it is also possible to have grub in hda but booting any other drive.

so you don't need a new device.map file just change every reference to hd1 to hd0

title xp
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

tile suse
root (hd0,3)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3
initrd /boot/inird.img or whatever suse uses.

2) Did your brother give you a timer before selection?
do you see a menu screen allowing you to select xp or does it jump straight to xp?
assuming timer read my tut on how to use the edit function to boot suse then amend the /boot/grub/menu.lst file as above if your bios is my suspect

Wasn't there a problem that Windows wants to be installed on the primary master?

http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2002/0...grub_win1.html

it is for w98, don't know about xp but still waiting for sm000ve to tell us some more

One safe method to do dual boot is:

Write the LILO or GRUB loader on the linux partition ( in extreme situations on the /boot partition)

Then use a program called bootpart (just google for it) , this program creates a pointer-file used by
the bootloader in windows NT / 2000 / XP & it updates the boot.ini. Using this method, you dont have to mess with the MBR.
Later on , if you are reinstalling linux , you dont have to change anything of the booting stuff.

If Windows don't wanna play . . leave it alone , because Linux is more adaptable !

Hi, am a complete Linux / SuSE newbie, and avidly reading this thread... I want to install a Linux distro on my laptop (Gateway 450x) to dual boot with XP SP2.

I was wondering, do the comments on this thread (regarding the troubles with booting XP after install) also apply to SuSE 9.1 personal? Everyone seems to have the Pro version of 9.1 or 9.2.

Does the driver update for Parted work for 9.1 personal? I can't tell if the portal.suse.com link ("Windows No Longer Boots Following the Installation of SUSE LINUX 9.1
Applies to: SUSE LINUX 9.1") applies to *all* versions of SuSE 9.1, or just Pro or whatever... it doesn't specify.

And when I read this in the instructions on that page: "Insert the installation CD/DVD... Boot the *first* installation CD or DVD up to the point where you can choose one of the different installation variants..." it lead me to believe that it *does not* apply to the personal version, since that only has one installation CD (which I burned from an ISO from our site here).

So, I'm very confused. I don't want to install before I know that I have a fix for this unbootable Windows problem. I *have* backed up my data, but if I can avoid the snafus, of course, I'd prefer to. Anyone have experience with SuSE 9.1 personal and dual booting with XP?

It seemed reassuring to see that at least SuSE is acknowledging this problem and providing a fix, but is this fix just reserved for the Pro version?

I also picked up the book _Linux for Non-Geeks_ which has a copy of a Fedora-based version of Linux. I can't immediately tell which Core it's based on (1,2 or 3). Are there fixes for Fedora Core distros?

Thanks in advance for any help!

~~ Niima

Forgot to mention my specs:

Gateway 450x laptop
2.00 GHz Pentium 4 mobile processor
30GB hard drive
512 mb ram
XP Pro SP2
CDROM-RW/DVD

I've resized my XP partition to 19,308 GB, leaving 9,308 GB free unallocated, unpartitioned space.

Thanks again,

~~ Niima

I would guess that the parted problem of 9.1 also applies to the Personal version. To be on the safe side, get the fix and install it anyway.

There is no major difference between Pro and Personal apart from the available software. So the fix applies to the Personal version aswell. That you have only one CD doesn't make a difference. Simply follow the instructions.

I don't see any problems with your hardware. Should work fine. Depending on your graphics adapter, you could get some trouble with ATI based cards, NVIDIA is always easier with Linux and especially SuSE (since the have an automated installer for the driver).

EDIT: I didn't realize that you already did the partitioning! So you don't get into any trouble with parted!!! Everything is fine, just let Yast create your new partitions.

Sorry, I slightly misspoke: I only *resized* my Windows XP NTFS partition last night, using BootIt NG. I have not created my Linux partition yet. I wanted to check in on this forum first before I started any of the install process. In other words, I have not used any of the Linux install disks yet.

Does Boot IT NG deal with parted?

So if YaST creates my new partition for SuSE/Linux, will it mess with the Windows partition? Is that where parted comes in? I have 9 GB free space on my hard drive now, unpartitioned (if that's the right term for it).

Thanks for your help (and any more you can give). I'll also try to find a thread on parted...

Also, the big fear I'm trying to fend off is finding out I can't boot Windows after having installed my Linux distro... is there a better place to ask about this?

Thanks again, from a totally confused (but excited to try Linux/SuSE) newbie :-)

No, no, no, everything will be fine (as I said already)!

Only the NTFS resize operation with parted may mess up the windows partition. So if you did resize already, just go on and have fun!

EDIT: I didn't realize that this thread indeed deals with the parted bug. But since the very recent discussion was about booting from secondary partitions, I thought this was a separate thread. Sorry, I will edit my post from above to avoid further confusion.