Reinstall Linux using my XP HD?

[gwxcore]

I absolutely loved Suse when I had the chance to use it. Lately I've been using XP because my "friend" was diddling around making Suse "better" and now when it checks the...sda3 or something it fails at 40% and won't let me log in. So here's what I want

I have a 20GB PATA HD with XP on it, that works fine (well as good as windows ever works) and I have the broken Suse10 on my 100GB SATA. Is there a way, while in windows, to look into my Suse HD, and format/reinstall suse and then have a not horrible OS. I only use XP because of my fiancee's school work needing XP to be compatible, otherwise I would pitch it and use only Suse forever.

[GNU-Fan]

Hello,

it is hard to give a remote diagnosis. It sounds like the 200GB harddisk is actually physically damaged--rendering it almost useless.
Whether you can access the information on that drive from within Windows depends on the filesystem on that drive. The most common for GNU/Linux are either ext(2,3) or reiserfs. You need to "teach" Windows how to handle these filesystems by installing the appropriate filesystem driver in Windows.

If this is too complicated, download and burn a LiveCd. These CDs can be booted and give you a GNU/Linux operating system without relying on any functional hard drive. From there, you can access the broken harddrive and run diagnostics or backup you data.

Here is what I suggest (after the backup):

Make a completely fresh install of you favorite OS on that functional 20GB drive. For your significant other's homework, install a virtual machine or an emulator such as
QEMU - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
VirtualBox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In that emulator environment install Windows.

The big harddrive is then free to store all the lesser important but larger files.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

Since OpenSuse 10 is a bit outdated now, I'd personally recommend downloading the latest version (11.0) and doing a fresh install with that:

Software.openSUSE.org

You don't need to be in Windows to do that. You can use a liveCD as suggested above to copy any data you need off of the old system before doing the install, and then restore it to the new system afterwards.

Hope it all goes well for you.

[gwxcore]

Well good news is a found a trial of a program that let me back up my files from suse, and now i'm waiting till i can get a DVD burned for me. Thanks anyway tho. expect me around here more often ^_^