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paulm
LXF regular
Joined: Mon Apr 03, 2006 5:53 am
Posts: 216
Location: Oxfordshire, UK
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 Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2012 6:15 am Post subject: The joy of OpenSUSE! |
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One of the first Linux distros that I ever used was SuSE (6.? I think). I found I wasn't that fond of Yast, nor of KDE, so I moved on. I've looked at it a few times since, but never for very long.
Earlier tonight, I made a mistake. I decided to install OpenSUSE 12.1 to have a look at it.
Install was ok, though it got very confused when I told it to skip testing my internet connection (couldn't remember the WPA pass phrase for my T-Mobile Pointer). Otherwise ok. Well, sort of.
I have multiple Linux distributions on my laptop - 2 copies of Salix, a CentOS 6.2 install, a Zenwalk install, etc. I've been using EasyBCD to avoid upsetting the Vista bootloader (Vista itself is much too easy to upset....). So I selected to install the SUSE version of grub to the / partition. Unfortunately, it seems that the OpenSUSE installer knew I must be an idiot, and decided to help out - it seems to have installed Grub to the MBR.
So now I have a Grub boot that doesn't work properly - it failed to find half the distros that are installed, and is passing control to whatever boot loader is enabled for those that it did find. Half of which don't work....
The question then is what is the safest way of giving control back to the Windows boot loader? In the past I've booted to windows and used fixmbr, but I don't know if that is current any more, and I don't want to risk screwing things up just because the idiot Suse installer didn't do as it was told.
Oh, I might also mention that I'll not be looking at any version of Suse again for a long time!
Paul. |
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dandnsmith
LXF regular
Joined: Fri Apr 15, 2005 11:01 am
Posts: 267
Location: Berks, UK
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| Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2012 8:47 am Post subject: |
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I suggest googling with search string: windows vista fixmbr
which throws up some helpful ways to fix things - depends what resources you have available.
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Derek |
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ajgreeny
LXF regular
Joined: Wed May 10, 2006 9:18 pm
Posts: 407
Location: Oxfordshire.
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| Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2012 12:38 pm Post subject: |
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As you are still on Vista you can use a ubuntu live CD/USB (and maybe a Suse live system) to restore a windows MBR. It may not work with Suse, of course, but I have no idea about that, so be very cautious.
Boot to your Live CD:
| Code: | | sudo apt-get install lilo |
Ignore the warning that will probably appear then
| Code: | | sudo lilo -M /dev/sda mbr |
Then you should be able to boot directly into Windows again if all goes well.
If you have a Windows Vista installation disk you can use that, of course, but often that is not available from OEMs and they give you a recovery disk which is useless for that job.
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Ubuntu 10.04 user, and loving it! |
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Bruno
LXF regular
Joined: Tue Sep 18, 2007 7:07 pm
Posts: 139
Location: Cambridgeshire, UK
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| Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2012 7:48 pm Post subject: |
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Hi paulm,
Sorry to hear you've been having problems with openSUSE 12.1. The grub installation and configuration part of the openSUSE installer is, IMHACCO as a long-time openSUSE user, the weakest link in the entire installation procedure. It is why I can't recommend openSUSE to Linux newbies, as much as I would love to do otherwise (not that I'm suggesting you are a newbie, I'm just having a little rant). What has happened here is that the installer has installed the bits of GRUB that go into your root partition (as you requested) and has also installed the bits of GRUB that go into the MBR, presumably because you did not deselect the option to also install to MBR. Confusing? Yes! However, you can (although you shouldn't have to) sort things out quite easily post-installation.
OpenSUSE 12.1 still uses GRUB 1 (aka 0.97 or legacy) by default, so to sort out the mess the installer has made, boot openSUSE 12.1, head over to /boot/grub/ and edit the file menu.lst. You'll need root privileges to edit this file and I suggest making a backup of it, first. To get Windows booting, assuming that you installed Vista on sda1, make sure you have a section in the menu.lst file that reads: | Code: | ###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows 1###
title Windows Vista
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1 |
To get distros that have grub installed in their root partition booting, make sure you have a sections for each distro in the menu.lst file that read: | Code: | ###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: Other Distro (/dev/sdXN)###
title Distro Name
root (hd0,N-1)
configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst |
This will pass control over to the bootloader of the other distro, where X is the disk and N is the partition number on that disk you want to boot. If you have distros that don't have GRUB installed in their root partition, you will need an entry that looks like this: | Code: | ###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: Other Distro (/dev/sdXN)###
title Distro Name
root (hd0,N-1)
kernel <path to kernel> root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-<SERIAL_NUMBER>-partN resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-<SERIAL_NUMBER>-partM splash=silent quiet showopts vga=0x317
initrd <path to initrd> |
Where M is your swap partition number. I hope this helps. |
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paulm
LXF regular
Joined: Mon Apr 03, 2006 5:53 am
Posts: 216
Location: Oxfordshire, UK
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| Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2012 10:55 pm Post subject: |
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| dandnsmith wrote: | I suggest googling with search string: windows vista fixmbr
which throws up some helpful ways to fix things - depends what resources you have available. |
 Did that. Unfortunately, the ones I found all seemed to require a Windows CD, which I don't have - the recovery CD doesn't cut it...
Paul. |
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paulm
LXF regular
Joined: Mon Apr 03, 2006 5:53 am
Posts: 216
Location: Oxfordshire, UK
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| Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2012 11:05 pm Post subject: |
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| ajgreeny wrote: | As you are still on Vista you can use a ubuntu live CD/USB (and maybe a Suse live system) to restore a windows MBR. It may not work with Suse, of course, but I have no idea about that, so be very cautious.
Boot to your Live CD:
| Code: | | sudo apt-get install lilo |
Ignore the warning that will probably appear then
| Code: | | sudo lilo -M /dev/sda mbr |
Then you should be able to boot directly into Windows again if all goes well. |
Hmm. Next time I'm in a distro that uses Lilo, I'll have to look at the man page - can't recall what the -M switch does.....
| Quote: | | If you have a Windows Vista installation disk you can use that, of course, but often that is not available from OEMs and they give you a recovery disk which is useless for that job. |
That was a lot of my initial problem - I have the original recovery DVDs for the T61, but no installation cd. And it seems that things like fixmbr are no longer available other than through the installation disk.
I did find a solution though. I've been using EasyBCD for quite a while. Turns out it has a couple of repair options that will replace the MBR. Once I'd managed to get back to Windows (  funny, its been run twice this week - I had to recover a hard drive with a proprietary format, only tools available for it are Windows - must be a record....), it only took a few minutes for EasyBCD to fix the mess that Suse had made.
Paul. |
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Marrea
LXF regular
Joined: Fri Apr 08, 2005 10:32 pm
Posts: 1846
Location: Chilterns, West Hertfordshire
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| Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2012 11:14 pm Post subject: |
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| Bruno wrote: | | The grub installation and configuration part of the openSUSE installer is, IMHACCO as a long-time openSUSE user, the weakest link in the entire installation procedure. |
Couldn't agree more. I've not so far tried dual-booting openSUSE with Windows Vista or 7 but on my multi-boot Windows XP/Linux computer I always like Windows ntldr to be in charge. A couple of years ago I ended up installing SUSE 11.2 three times before I managed to achieve this, so confusing were the options!
The way I eventually got it to work was at the booting stage of the installation procedure I selected only "Boot from Root Partition" in the Boot Loader Locations list, and made sure that nothing was selected in the Boot Loader Options list.
Unfortunately this will hardly be of any comfort to paulm now. 
Edit I see that he has managed to solve the problem. Excellent!  |
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nelz
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Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2005 12:52 pm
Posts: 8002
Location: Warrington, UK
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| Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2012 11:46 pm Post subject: |
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| paulm wrote: | Next time I'm in a distro that uses Lilo, I'll have to look at the man page - can't recall what the -M switch does.....
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You can read the man page for just about everything, without installing it, at http://linux.die.net/man/
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Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who it's friends are. |
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Bruno
LXF regular
Joined: Tue Sep 18, 2007 7:07 pm
Posts: 139
Location: Cambridgeshire, UK
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| Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2012 2:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Marrea wrote: | | A couple of years ago I ended up installing SUSE 11.2 three times before I managed to achieve this, so confusing were the options! |
Yes, you'd think that the whole point of an installer was to make things easier . A while ago I posted some ideas on openFATE about improving the situation but was asked to clarify my musings, as at the time they were a bit sketchy. Perhaps it is time to resurrect that old thread. However, with the inevitable move (at some stage) to GRUB 2, which AFAIK does detection of other OSes present itself (and hopefully a better job, too), things may sort themselves out.
One thing I don't like is that when I install openSUSE as a dual booting OS on my computers that also have Windows XP on them, I get entries in the GRUB menu for non-booting Windows partitions (D drive and E drive that I use to contain the page file), presumably just because they are on NTFS partitions. I can't remember how well it does with adding entries for other Linux distros, as I am so used to fixing the menu.list file after installation that I usually delete extra entries during installation.
I'm thinking that in a multi-boot scenario, the boot loader really should have it's own partition and be independent of all of the host OSes but be able to communicate with them as necessary (like during installation). Can GRUB 2 do this? I'm also thinking of getting back to openSUSE again... If we still have GRUB 1 on the next release, would anyone know of something that was a signature of a boot-able Windows partition? Presumably the presence of C:\WINDOWS\system and/or C:\WINDOWS\system32 on the partition? Come to think of it, anything that could help it better identify other Linux installations? |
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nelz
Moderator
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2005 12:52 pm
Posts: 8002
Location: Warrington, UK
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| Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2012 2:27 pm Post subject: |
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| Bruno wrote: |
I'm thinking that in a multi-boot scenario, the boot loader really should have it's own partition and be independent of all of the host OSes but be able to communicate with them as necessary (like during installation). Can GRUB 2 do this? |
GRUB1 can do it, the initial bootloader code is installed to the MBR, with a pointer to the partition that holds the rest of its files. This can be on any partition with a filesystem readable by GRUB. It's more useful with GRUB1 than GRUB2 because the latter can regenerate its menus automatically.
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Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who it's friends are. |
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paulm
LXF regular
Joined: Mon Apr 03, 2006 5:53 am
Posts: 216
Location: Oxfordshire, UK
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| Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2012 5:34 pm Post subject: |
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| nelz wrote: | | Bruno wrote: |
I'm thinking that in a multi-boot scenario, the boot loader really should have it's own partition and be independent of all of the host OSes but be able to communicate with them as necessary (like during installation). Can GRUB 2 do this? |
GRUB1 can do it, the initial bootloader code is installed to the MBR, with a pointer to the partition that holds the rest of its files. This can be on any partition with a filesystem readable by GRUB. It's more useful with GRUB1 than GRUB2 because the latter can regenerate its menus automatically. |
I used the OS/2 boot manager for a long time - small primary partition, independent of anything else. Trouble is, it does use up an all too finite resource, with only three other primary partitions available.
Paul. |
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nelz
Moderator
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2005 12:52 pm
Posts: 8002
Location: Warrington, UK
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| Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2012 6:14 pm Post subject: |
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GRUB can use a logical partition.
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Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who it's friends are. |
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paulm
LXF regular
Joined: Mon Apr 03, 2006 5:53 am
Posts: 216
Location: Oxfordshire, UK
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| Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 2:17 am Post subject: |
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| nelz wrote: | | GRUB can use a logical partition. |
I have an even better answer. I use an 80 GB primary, which just happens to have Vista installed. When I think about it, I use Vista probably once a month, usually long enough to install all the current security patches, anti mailware data and other useful things. So, thanks to EasyBCD and its re-engineered version of Grub legacy, I've got a really oversized boot loader partition.
Paul. |
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Ram
LXF regular
Joined: Thu Apr 07, 2005 10:44 pm
Posts: 1552
Location: Guisborough
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| Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 1:18 pm Post subject: |
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My preferred way of multi booting is to keep Linux & Windows on different drives and using the motherboards bios to select which OS I wish to use.
I also set the drive order in the bios this I found can upset opensuse partition detection when setting up grub.
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Ubuntu LXDE 12.04 running on AMD Phenom II*4; ASUS Crosshair III Formula MB; 4 GB Ram.....
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Marrea
LXF regular
Joined: Fri Apr 08, 2005 10:32 pm
Posts: 1846
Location: Chilterns, West Hertfordshire
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| Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2012 1:40 pm Post subject: |
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| I am a great fan of EasyBCD. I started using it after buying my first Windows 7 computer and discovering that trying to configure the text-based Windows BCDEdit was going to be far more complicated than XP's boot.ini. For someone like myself who tends to change distros every so often but wants to make sure Windows 7 is never disturbed, the GUI EasyBCD is brilliant. |
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