Problems Dual Booting Suse And Winxp Options

[Alowishus]

I installed SuSE 9.2 on my 20 gig IDE hard drive so I could dual boot with Windows XP professional which resides on my 80 gig SATA hard drive. When Im in the GRUB menu and I choose windows, I get a red error screen that tells me that I cant boot into windows and to press space to continue (it also shows a memory address, but I forgot to write it down). Out of desperation, I tried the "fixboot" command in windows recovery console, and now when I try to boot into windows through GRUB, it shows vertical letters with multicolored bars. I can still get into windows as long as I bypass my linux hard drive. Could someone lend me some help please? I realy want to get into linux.

[Jim]

What hard drive did you install GRUB too, it sounds like you have some issues with what is the boot order here.

This is how it should work. You should have GRUB installed on the MBR of what ever hard drive is the master hard drive. Then when you boot GRUB will pop up and all that good jazz.

You probably also have an issue with your conf file for grub steming from the differences with SATA.

What does your boot line for Windows look like in GRUB? (You can get to it from GRUB by pressing e wile the windows boot option is selected.)

[Alowishus]

The master HD is the 20 gig IDE, this is where grub resides. In grub.conf, it says

root (hd0,1)
install --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) /boot/grub/stage2 0x8000
(hd0,1)/boot/grub/menu.lst
quit

PS. The patterns of the multicolored bars changes from time to time, its realy weird. I havent let it go too far because I fear it will cause damage to my Windows partition.

[Jim]

Was that your grub.conf file from /boot/grub/grub.conf?

How did you get to it if you can't get into linux.

In order to boot windows you need an entry that looks something like this.

CODE

# For booting Windows NT or Windows95
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader  +1

Which is distincly diferent that then entry for the linux system. The only difference you are going to need is for the address of the root of windows to change. Mine is on the primary partition of my master drive so its (hd0,0). If your windows drive is on the slave slot it should probably be (hd1,0)

I am a little confused about your set up now. Is your SATA on RAID?

[Alowishus]

I can get into both linux and windows, but I can only get into one or the other. If I want to use windows, I would have to set my 80 gig sata as master and 20 gig IDE as slave in my bios settings. If I want to use linux I can leave the 20 gig as my master drive, but then when I select windows in the GRUB menu, I get the weird color error. I'm not using raid, I just have a sata drive. The only grub.conf file I found was that one, and thats all it said . I can look deeper into this when I get home from school.

PS. Just to recap my setup goes like this:

Master: 20 gig IDE w/ SuSE linux (this is where the MBR is)
Slave: 80 gig SATA w/ Windows XP professional.

[Jim]

Ya your grub.conf file is screwed up then.

The grub.conf file is stored at /boot/grub/grub.conf

The file should look something like this.

CODE

#
# Sample boot menu configuration file
#

# Boot automatically after 30 secs.
timeout 10

# By default, boot the first entry.
default 0

# For booting GNU/Linux
title  Gentoo
root (hd1,0)
kernel /kernel-2.6.11-gentoo-r4 root=/dev/hdb3
initrd /initrd-2.6.11-gentoo-r4

# For booting Windows NT or Windows95
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader  +1

Your Windows boot entry will probably be (hd1,0) for the first partition on the slave drive. Your linux entry will be completely different, but your linux entry seems to work just fine. See if you can find your grub.conf file and make it look a little more like it should. If you need help, post the whole thing.

[Alowishus]

Im going to reinstall SuSE, and then check the grub.conf file against what you showed me and change it accordingly. Thanks for your help Jim, you are a far cry from the stereotypical pompous "Linux Gurus" that I work with

[Jim]

1) We try hard here not to be pompus. Go back and read my first post, ounce I was as big a n00b as ever

2) Alow me to just re-iterate, you aren't changing it to exactly what I have. The kernel and init options for my linux system wont work with yours.

3) You shouldn't need to re-install SuSE just to get grub working, but its probably to late by the time you read the post. Let me know how it goes.

[Alowishus]

Im not changing my grub.conf to exactly what you have (I got the hint from the title line saying "gentoo" ) Im just going to use what you showed me as a guideline.