Guys

I followed Mad Malcs suggestions. Coupled with a new version of parted at boot time and a reinstall I now have a working XP / Linux machine. Had to reinstall my windows s/w but managed to get an old Zip drive to work under Linux to take all of my data and took the opportunity to go Firefox / Open Office, so not a bad thing overall but the real win was managed to install my kid's games again! <G>

Both me and Ty (ageed 7 and 3/4) want to thank you all very much for the help on this one.

I dont know who I'm more cross with - Suse for selling a broken distro or HP for what is a really poor bit of design. I do know i'm very grateful to those people on here whol took the time to help me out.

Tom

I wuld like to install a dual boot WinXP (existing) and SUSE 9.3. There is a Parted in the Suse installation disk that I would like to use in order to shrink my existing windows partition and create new partitions for Linux. Will Parted keep the information in the Win partition or it's going top be deleted /damaged? I am a little bit anxious to procseed...

Hi Panka
It always pays to do a couple of things before your first dual boot with windows.
I recommend backing up your valuable data, and defragging the windows.
Then check you have enough spare space within the usual windows C: drive about 5GB should be sufficient.
Then proceed with your linux install (go with the defaults).
I've never yet (touching some wood as I speak) lost any windows data as a result of installing any linux distro as a dual boot. However I still do a back up everytime, as there is always a first time for anything.
When installing linux I always have every peripheral connected to the PC and switched on, the only thing I disconnect is the telephone cable from the modem to the telephone socket, during the early stages of install and reconnect it when/if the distro like SUSE gets to a stage to 'test the internet connection'.
You will be pleased with your dual boot machine.

Mad Malc

Mad Male,

You are recommending to go with the default, but...
I read a bit about partitions and found that many people recommend to make aditional partitions for /swap and /data (for shared data with windows). However the default in my installation gives just a /boot and /root.

What do you think?

Hi Panka
I know a lot of people talk about having partitions for different areas, I'm one of them and I do recommend them but not for a first install.
The reason for that is, not that I would expect you to get into trouble, but after the first default install you will then have a space with a working Windows system and a space with a working linux distro on it. Linux might take more space than you want at frist, but you will also be able to see what spare space is left in the linux install partitions
After playing about a bit with your new dual boot you can then boot into XP and delete your linux partitions, then you can create a FAT32 partition for the sort of data you would like to be able to access from both operating systems, music springs to mind.
Then because you have the knowledge from your default install as to the space linux takes up you can then re-install and split up your linux partitions as you would like.

Mad Malc

hmm i never had this problem
maybe because i ate grub and use lilo insted ????

Thanks ...turtle - Apreciate your insight. Previously, on a different, older laptop w/ Win98ish, I was able to set up dual boot and install Red Hat OK. This time, I was using a newer laptop w/ XP Professional, and a single C: drive, as from IBM. Tried installing SuSE 9.1 from the CD I got with a book, and did not partition first. Disk manager was not cooperating with my attempts to partition, though more than 20 Gb of space available.

Installed from the CD. Process seemed to go OK. But at re-boot am getting the above error, w/ no other codes to identify. As a result, cannot boot from the hard disk, and only from the CD. Whch leaves me only SuSE. Original C: drive was NTFS.

Am I at the point where I have to re-install XP and start over, in your opinion?

Thanks and regards,

eaglone

Hi there!

My very first post here. This forum seems great for a Linux beginner!





I have two easy questions, if someone care to help?

The first;
I have Suse 9.3 and XP on one harddrive. It works great. However, as we all know, XP must be installed from time and again. How do I do that? If I install XP a new, wont it break GRUB?

Mad Malc wrote;
"Hi Linus Vanpelt
You are quite right in your assumption that an XP upgrade will over write the MBR, hopefully the boot floppy will do the trick, if not you can always boot from the Suse install disc and choose repair, that definitly works from personal experience.

Mad Malc"

Does this work? I dont want to loose everything I have on SUSE, because I misunderstood a post. I dont have a floppy drive in my computer, so I guess I have to use the SUSE 9.3 boot CD (and then choose "repair").

If Mad Malc's claim works, I want to ghost XP (using Acronis - which can boot from a CD, Norton 2003 can only boot from a floppy). Ghosting XP wont be a problem, right?







My second question;
When I installed SUSE, something went wrong so I cant see my NTFS partitions when running SUSE. Can someone post their etc/fstab so I can manually add the NTFS lines?

Hi Kebabbert

I don't know about version 9.3 in Suse, but there is one way to find out, provided you haven't downloaded to many updates or added lots of other application source files.

That is to re-boot from the SUSE install CD/DVD and then when it gets to identifying the existing SUSE install see if it gives you the repair option.

I've used it quite a few times when SUSE wouldn't boot on 9.1 and 9.2, and it's not always been entirely down to Grub problems, so sometimes a boot floppy will not do the job.

You could go with the repair option and see what it does, you can also play about.

In my opinion it pays to know how an automated fix from a boot disc works, so that you can plan how to recover from disaster when it strikes, even if it's all self induced with Linux, unlike another operating system I won't mention.

Mad Malc

I tried Acronis to ghost. It works flawless with grub and win xp and suse. I just choose "reboot and restore" and the ghost image is up and running in a few minutes. Recommended!

Wow, I'm going crazy, 8 pages about fixing the boot loader. I TRIED REALLY HARD to get this, but I'm scared $%^%$#%* to do anything NOW! Everybody's situation is a bit different.

What about using YAST's boot loader setup? Isn't that supposed to work? I REALLY don't want to start all over, it's been very long already just getting this far. (W2K and Suse 9.2 Pro both installed on separate harddrives, Suse running and online, Windows is there and Suse sees it, but lost the NTLDR). I've read masses of stuff with mile-long instructions in high-tech language that spins my head til I'm dizzy. The links provided all discuss a different configuration, which may not be such a big deal AFTER I've done this once and understand how it works. Until then, I'm totally confused and don't have another 2 days to spend re-doing everything (like getting 2 PCs on a router with lame SBC and dual harddrives online really sucked, for example). Thanks to everybody for all the great posts and help. You guys are really great here!

THIS IS WHAT I DID:
Started with 2 clean internal harddrives, one IDE, one SATA.
Loaded W2K first on IDE.
Partitioned SATA drive using Suse from the DVD. Installed Suse.
System pulls up a Suse menu of choices to boot Suse, Windows, or Suse failsafe.
Linux boots fine and works great. Lovin' that!!! Windows won't, gives the NTLDR message.

PARTITIONS:
HDA has W2K on D and E is files, NTFS. C is FAT32 and empty.
SDA is Linux; SDA1 is /boot. SDA2 is extended to 5 through 10. sda5 is / sda6 is swap; the rest are home, usr, var, local

THIS IS WHAT THE YAST BL SETUP IS GIVING ME TO RE-CONFIGURE:
Boot L Location: scsi, /dev/sda (MBR)
Disk order: /dev/sda, /dev/hda
Default section: suse linux9.2
Available sections: suse linux 9.2 (default), windows, floppy, failsafe suse
Activate boot loader partition: no
Replace code in mbr: leave untouched
Back up affected disk areas: no
Add saved mbr to book loader menu: no
Save method: save only changed files
~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I can change any of the above. However, I have no clue how to do that. Can anyone help? Or is this the right thing to do anyway? It's probably super easy, but I don't want to mess it up. One thing I'm not at all scared to do now is make changes in the BIOS, understand it pretty well, and it's actually really easy.

The other option seems to be re-setting the boot loader through RESCUE on the Suse DVD?
Yikes, that scares me even more! (never done any of this before). Ok, so I braved it as far as up to the 3 choices on the install menu, which are: start install or update, boot installed system, or start rescue system. I'm supposed to start rescue???? What happens then? Can we break the rules and allow "alternative" language on this particular thread? Somehow, it seems to be in order here, IMH and Freaked Out Opinion. (I resisted, but it was hard!)


...as a side comment, Suse seems to have a few glitches. Before, I was using it single booting and I had sound, CD player and a USB working for a microphone, but the printer quit after awhile (printer works fine). With this second installation the printer is now working great, networked, but the other stuff doesn't work at all and I've had a few crashes and error messages too. Plus it doesn't seem to be able to install the proper video driver, which is annoying because it was all there before I started this dual boot project.

Hi Niaga

This is just an observation, but most threads where a dual boot comes unstuck, tend to be where for security (or nervousness) reasons, the person with the problem has installed 2 hard drives...

The problems I encountered multi-booting just windows (without linux) led me to conclude that the Mobo gives the main boot drive preferrential bandwidth. The result was highly unstable operating systems on the second drive.

So I now keep one drive for operating systems, nicely partitioned up and the other drive for data. It simplifies things and takes out the apparent hardware preference.

Mad Malc

MadMalc,
that's very interesting.

Do you think I should move Linux onto the IDE drive?
Not sure what you meant by "where a dual boot comes unstuck."
I haven't got it "stuck" once even yet. Not sure how to do it. It would not be a big deal to repartition the SATA drive clean and then reinstall Linux on the IDE drive, I guess. Although, I've never done it. So, there is the worry of doing that correctly without wiping W2K away. Do you recommend I switch Linux over? The reason I bought the second drive in the first place is because I need both OSes and wanted one system I can rely on. It's almost all new parts. Have this old Gateway with windows on it that isn't worth spending much money on and may not last much longer. I need a reliable system and I really like Linux A LOT.

Would I still do the rescue disk afterwards for reinstalling the GRUB? Could you please help me get through this? I don't understand what I should do and I know if I could just get over this hurdle and get it installed correctly I could start to learn Linux better.
My goal is to be free of Windows someday. Maybe that's unrealistic, but I'd rather struggle with Linux through learning, than struggle with W$. I would be happpy to do it on my own if I could find some material that spoke to my specific intallation needs and was written in easy to understand language. Could you please help me find something like that or refer me? I would appreciate it so much. If anyone could help me find EASY DETAILED info I would be very thankful.

Hi to everybody I new to the forum and I couldn't figure out where to post my 2 questions (I'm still a newbie to linux)
I ftp installed SUSE 9.3 and Im able to load more software but when I tried to set YOU it cant find a mirror server list it tells me it can only be user defined, I have tried that but I always get the same error "couldn't CDW to either i386, or 9.3"
can anyone help? Please
2. for some reason firefox does not load pages it times out. I tried using opera but i will kindda works (it starts but after the 3rd page it gives me 404 errors) so the only browser that seems to work is Konqueror but its rather slow and I don't really like it
again your comments shall be greatly appreciated.