Dual boot OpenSUSE 11.4/ Win 7 quit no longer boots FIXED!!

[LGOG]

Selecting shut down and reboot from windows brought a black screen and blinking cursor with Grub failing to start. The LXF Disaster Recovery Kit on the LXF166 Disc saved the day and at least boots the installed OpenSUSE. However try as I might I have not been able to restore normal startup.

None of the following worked though each reported completing successfully:
- Grub terminal find menu.lst and setup
- Yast bootloader option using previously working settings
- Yast restore backup MBR
- Win recovery fix startup problems, Windows reports "the partition table does not have a valid System Partition" then "repair completed successfully"

My preference would be to fix this, any suggestions or help would be appreciated.

[johnhudson]

If you are reporting the order in which you did things, that might be the problem. Windows is notorious for overwriting anything in the MBR.

Does Windows boot as normal? If not, you may need to start with Parted Magic to restore the first partition table.

If you can get Windows to boot normally, that is the time to use the recovery disk to restore the MBR so that it points to GRUB once more.

[LGOG]

Thanks for the response but no windows doesn't boot, the system hangs after POST so nothing boots. I tried each of those things in turn rebooting each time. I was willing to let windows overwrite the MBR knowing I could restore GRUB if that worked. All the windows recovery seems to do is make sda1 active, where SUSE default is sda4, with my partition setup.

I've been able to make changes to the partition table using gparted so I don't think it's the problem. It is as if the first sectors of the MBR are not being written to or read, but I am at a loss how to test for that.

[LGOG]

UNBELIEVABLE-- somehow when windows failed to shut down and reboot the bios boot order of the hard drives got changed (I have two).

Life is good everything is working again.

[johnhudson]

That's the reason why (open)SUSE uses disk-by-id identification so that, whatever order it is presented with multiple disks, it never confuses them.

[Ram]

UNBELIEVABLE-- somehow when windows failed to shut down and reboot the bios boot order of the hard drives got changed (I have two).

Life is good everything is working again.

I also use 2 separate drives, Ubuntu / Grub on my master drive as order by the bios, DVD is 2nd and Windows 7 third.

Never had that issue with Updates / Reboot but 99% of the time I use the bios to select the Windows drive by press F8 as the PC boots up.