if i install grub to MBR of HDA and reboot i just get 'grub' printed into top left corner of the screen...then it just locks there, i've left it for 20mins and it didnt respond.
i cant see what diff. windows being installed would make to the mbr of the hdd.....now i find that when i boot into suse it wont even display the contents of a cd even tho its mounting it ok, its getting worse

if i install grub to MBR of HDA and reboot i just get 'grub' printed into top left corner of the screen...then it just locks there, i've left it for 20mins and it didnt respond.
i cant see what diff. windows being installed would make to the mbr of the hdd.....now i find that when i boot into suse it wont even display the contents of a cd even tho its mounting it ok, its getting worse

ok, is it likely to make a differnces if i install windows to the second partion and suse to the primary?

FYI, i changed it so windows was on second partition on the laptopns hdd and ....now the bootloader works ;)

Strange. The only thing I can guess is that YaST wasn't correctly detecting the drives geometry. I don't expect that you will have any problems in your current configuration (You really shouldn't have any).

Thank's for posting your solution. Far too few people are considerate enough to do so.

well, to be honest it couldn't be Yast as i had same problem with mandrake, the only one that didnt cause a fuss was fedora, but then none of them will work with the ati radeon mobility 9200 gfx card :'( so i'm pretty stuffed