vista opensuse 10.3 dual boot

[cwgibson]

hello, this is my first post so i would like to say hi to everyone. i have a friend that was interested in linux so i gave him a couple of my install disc that i had. he had vista installed and when he installed suse 10.3 everything went wrong. he tells me that he let suse install itself so it has a default partition setup but here is his other settings:

c: raid 0, 2 80gig sata hd ntfs (vista installed here)
E: ide (has xp installed but does not work)
F: 250gig sata ntfs 5gig fat 32 (suse installed here)
30gig ntfs (nothing installed)

after suse was installed he gets grub 17 error and nothing will boot.
anyone have any ideas.

[gogalthorp]

How did he install Suse into a Fat partition??

[cwgibson]

my bad he formatted it with windows as fat 32 but i feel positive that it is ext3 now.

[Jonathan183]

my bad he formatted it with windows as fat 32 but i feel positive that it is ext3 now.

Can you run linux from a live cd and run

fdisk -l

and post the output.

[asimpson]

Hello to all. fdisk -1 command yielded: command not found

[cwgibson]

did you put a space between fdisk and the - ?

[asimpson]

I've tried both ways, same result. For clarity, I am typing commands in the gnome terminal.

[cwgibson]

it is a lowercase L not 1

[gogalthorp]

You must be root and the parameter is a lower case L not a numeric. You are telling fdisk to list all the partitions it sees.

Note the best way to install is to first to free up the space you want Suse to use by resizing or deleting partitions then simply let the installer find and partition the space. Suse bye default installs 3 partitions swap, root, and home. home is optional but you must have a root and should have a swap. If you manually set the partitions you must tell the installer how they are to be mounted ie / (root) /home etc.

[cwgibson]

that is basically what he did; vista was installed on the raid 0 array then he added a 250gig hd not in the array and installed suse. when he did that he couldnt boot into either and got the grub 17 error. he can boot from the live cd and use the terminal to use the fdisk command. not having used raid i dont know if this is a bios thing or a grub problem with vista.