I had previously been running suse 10.3 and vista but i decided to get rid of vista and go back to xp and install suse 11.1.

Anyway i did the normal thing loaded up xp on a clean disk using around 50% for the partition. I then setup suse 11.1 on the empty space and allowed grub to control the mbr.

And it worked fine. Until i was messing with yast and did somthing after which it wouldn't boot it would hang with a flashing cursor in the top left of the screen and would not get as far as showing grub.

So i thought i'd reload it all again from scratch after wiping the disk and not mess with yast!

So i did it all again and this time literally didn't touch anything and it worked fine when i set it up.

But now a couple of days later i have gone to use my laptop and it won't boot again! Just a cursor in the top left again.

So my question is, is there a known issue with suse 11.1 on dual boot with xp? If so how do i fix it? I really don't want to reload it all from scratch again and i know from when it happened the first time trying to fix the mbr using the suse dvd or the xp cd doesn't make any difference.

Dual XP and opensuse 11.1 and it works just fine. No problem at all

Well that doesn't really help. Does anyone have any suggestions?

No but you did not gives much to go on.
No error messages nothing.
Only it does not work,
So it just guessing is youŕe files corrupted ?
Is youŕe boot sector corrupted ?
Or is there something else going on.

Guessing, maybe hd?

It isn't a hard disk problem because in any other possible configuration it works perfectly. There is only a problem when suse 11.1 is put on for dual boot.

I can't give you any error messages because there are none it doesn't get far enough for that, it doesn't even get as far as grub. Like i said as soon as it attempts to boot it just shows a cursor flashing in the top left and thats it.

Its certainty suse is causing the problem i just want to know how to fix it?

What do mean by a other possible configuration ?
Why are you so sure that opensuse is guilty of the problem ?
If the HD works perfect in non dual boot than it could be that you have to fix the boot sector or boot record.
Because if you have try to reinstall GRUB , and it wont work than reinstall failed because of a mistake or the MBR can not hold it
When you reinstall opensuse did perform a media check , it happens sometimes that is correct the first time and later on it becomes incorrect
As I stated before I use Windows XP and opensuse 11.1 it works perfect.

Hello. Well, I had exactly the same problem as described by Jon Briggs, I decided to give the new openSUSE 11.1 a try and thus I installed it along with my Windows XP. Everything went okay, detected at first, I was really liking the new opensuse. However as I'm currently needing more time of windows, I went to yast and changed the default boot on grub to windows xp. Restarted, and: White cursor blinking on Black background, right after POST. I tried to rebuild the grub, fixboot and fixmbr with windows cd, other tools with my partedmagic cd, googling, etc. As I was in a great need to have windows working, I did continue my investigation and decided to save the data and format and reinstall windows. I could report this issue to novell, but I have no logs, will there be a problem? I don't know if they require any log upload...

This is a HP laptop with a full Intel 945 chipset.

The only problem I have had to work around is when going from XP to suse I have to shut down. If I try to restart from XP to the suse boot it is a no go. I can how ever use restart from suse to XP and it will boot. I think it has to do with the m/b because I did not have this problem with another desktop set.

Look at the "comments" section at the bottom of the review. Looks like a few people with this problem.

http://www.headshotgamer.com/review.aspx?id=103

Yes, indeed there are some people that referred the same issue as described in this post.

I also had one other problem with 11.1, the boot issue I described happened on the second time I installed it (from scratch, along with windows), but that time I manually changed grub's menu.lst to default windows, rebooted and then got the famous "Non-system disk or disk error", I decided to give openSUSE dvd automatic repair a try, it checked for many possible issues, found errors on grub, corrected grub at it's way, and rebooted.

The error was not fixed, I reinserted the dvd, tried again the repair, and now there was an error about /dev/sda1 (my windows partition), it couldn't verify what the filesystem was.

Then I restarted and tried my partedmagic cd in order to see what has happening. I got very admired when I saw the windows partition had 3mb less then before, thus now ending on a cilinder boundary. I wasn't really inside the subject, but after some hours of research I could fix the partition and get my data back, then proceeded the a whole formatting of my disk.

I think it was openSUSE's automatic repair which partially destroyed the partition table, there is probably some bug, but next time I won't try to fix anything with automatic software.

Folks, this may or may not be your solution, but I just spent two hours struggling with Grub and the blinking cursor. I finally gave up and installed Lilo, and that didn't work either. It hung at the same place with a blinking cursor.

The solution to my problem was actually in my bios. My system has both PATA/IDE drives and SATA drives. The boot loaders were trying to start the first drives, but it just turned out to be the wrong drives. As soon as I switched the boot order in my bios to boot the IDE drives before the SATA, everything started working perfectly.

Hi,
I had the same problem. As Larry Webb said, I could boot into XP and later in VISTA only after shut down and restarting my computer again. Now I have WINDOWS 7 beta and SUSE 11.1 and this is not happening any more.

As igordcard said about repairing from DVD, this is a problem I could not resolve and has happened to me too when I tried to repair GRUB bootloader after installing Windows 7 upon VISTA (I did clean install). At the end I had to reinstall SUSE. I got exactly the same error messages as igorcard.

Hello!

I know the problem,because i have the same problem.After rebooting is blank screen...
This is because jou have wrong partition table!!! So jou need Partition Doctor 3.5 and make bootcd or flopy!!
Then repair partitions (windows). Whay this hapen ???? How to rapair SUSE stil dont know ,because im new in LINUX!
Please backup partitions table for future!!

PS Sorry for my English!

Hi
all

A different slant on dual boot, Acer Laptop Aspire 1800.
Partioned drive to take 11.1 and Xp. installed both.
At boot menu selected 11.1 it ran OK sutdown and rebooted a few times plus restrat every thing OK.

However when windows selected it retured to boot menu. started 11.1
yast and bootloader made new version of bootloader.

first signs good until selecting windows it ran but the next time I booted it went into windows unable to see boot menu.

Any ideas?