Vista Business and Suse 11.0 incompatability.

[jallan]

Hi, I tried installing Suse 11.0 on a PC already running Vista Business, which worked fine until I tried to boot Vista from the dual boot menu. When I did so I got a disk error, this is due to the dual boot system being incompatible with Vista. I found a fix on the internet that requires a file to be modified in the terminal window, I tried to find the file and it stated not found. Does anyone know of an easy fix or a different version of Linux that will dual boot perfectly with Vista. I have Ubuntu 7.04 and Mandiva 2007 Spring Free, I haven't tried them as I had to reinstall Vista to correct the problem and I don't wish to do this again. I would really appreciate any help on this, thank you, Jason.

[techieMoe]

I would first very highly recommend that before you try installing any distribution that you make sure you have the most recent version. Ubuntu 8.04 (the latest version of Ubuntu) offers a new option for installing alongside Microsoft Windows. It's called Wubi.

Basically Wubi lets you install Ubuntu just like any other Windows application, and sets up the dual-boot for you. When and if you decide you don't want Ubuntu anymore you can uninstall it from the Add/Remove dialog in Vista. There's a slight performance hit, but it's faster than running a LiveCD and safer than a traditional dual-boot (as you can probably attest).

[bigtomrodney]

I'd recommend using the newer release of Ubuntu as there was more time to work out any issues with Vista. Ubuntu 8.04 (2008 April) is the latest and 8.10 is due next month. I don't think you'll have the same issues with these.

By the way did you do a full reinstall or just repair your master boot record?

[jallan]

Thankyou everyone, I will try this next. Yes what I did was I resorted to a completely new istallation of Vista. I tried to repair it but the function wasn't able to repair the dual boot modifications made by Suse 11.0, Jason.

[daark.child]

Thats a strange one because I run openSUSE 11.0 alongside Windows Vista and for me everything went smoothly i.e. repartitioning vista, installing openSUSE and booting up both OSes successfully. It probably would have helped if you has posted the errors you got whilst trying to boot Vista from openSUSE on this forum. I suspect that the problem could be a grub bootoader error if you have multiple NTFS partitions.

[jallan]

Yes, I think you are right, it was the grub and I do have multiple partitions. I'm going to install the version mentioned in the first post to try and avoid the difficulty. Thank you for your reply, Jason.