Lost Windows on Boot

I have installed Suse 9.2 on a second hard drive (slave to a win xp).Unfortunately, the installation was messed up for some reason (thats another story!). Now when i come to boot the machine the Grub loader came up as i expected it, but there was only three options: Start Suse, Suse (failsafe) and another one in the middle. But there was no option to boot into windows. Selecting either Start Suse or the failsafe option results in an error when it loads up. I think i must have messed up the configuration of the boot loader on installation or something, because there is no option to boot into windows.

How can i get back the ability to boot into Windows? If needs be i can delete/uninstall Suse as i will need to do a new install anyway, but i could really do without losing my windows.

Would putting my Windows CDRom in and booting up from that allow me to get into windows and fix the broken master boot record?

After a few hours of frustration, i have finally found out how to get my master boot record back.

(Copied from iamotageek.com)

"There's hundreds of reasons why you would need to repair your master boot record: Installed Linux, dual booting with any OS, corruption are a few of the biggest reasons you'd have made changes to your MBR. How do you restore it to your original Windows XP one you ask?

In these instructions I'm using the operating system is on hard disk 0 AKA drive C.

Furthermore this guides assumes that your operating system is on Harddisk 0, drive C:\)

First of all Windows XP Recovery Console Installation Guide You'll have to have it installed ;)

When you reboot make sure that you select the recovery Console. If it's not installed and you can't get into windows to install it then you'll have to boot to your windows XP CD to get into the Recovery Console.

When the Recovery Console prompts you or which system you want to start type 1 and hit enter.
After the Console has finished loading type in the following:
fixmbr /device/harddisk0

You'll see some warnings and just type y which answers yes to all of the prompts

After that you can restart and you're back to using the default MS boot loader, booting to the right hard disk now."

Hope someone finds that usefull. Theres a lot more usefull information on the microsoft support website (usefull? Microsoft? Same sentence? wow).

I had the same problem with my Windows partition after updating. I used my Partition Magic 8.0 floppies to discover that my C: drive had been hidden by Linux.

Why couldn't you have just edited your grub.conf file and added windows to it?

simply edit /boot/grub/menu.lst as root and add this to it with a blank line between the last entry to boot windows

Code:

---

title=Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

---

I don't think he could boot into Suse, though, even in failsafe.

If that is in fact the case, he'd need to boot with a Live CD, mount the partition with the /boot directory on it, and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst from there. One of the Suse CD's is live, if I recall. And if he's going to reinstall Suse anyway, restoring the NT mbr with the recovery console is probably the easiest option.