[SOLVED] Dual boot Suse11.2 and XP

[Kelpie]

I installed open SUSE to dual boot with XP and have an interesting problem. When my computer rebooted to complete the SUSE install, it would not work at all. I rebooted and the GRUB came up with operating system choices, but when I chose one, absolutely nothing would happen. I tried to reinstall SUSE and nothing happened. I rebooted with the XP cd and nothing happened. I then rebooted with a bood cd I have and it showed the hard drive but could not test it and said it was absent.

After freaking out, I shut the computer all the way off and started it up again. Now it works. It seems that I cannot reboot the system for it to work. I have to turn it all the way off before it will work at all.

Windows runs as well but was a bit shaky to start. I think it's ok now.

Anyone know why a reboot will not restart the system and I have to shut it all the way down? Soft boot, hard boot, doesn't make any difference.

[gogalthorp]

This is a hardware issue. The new electronic off/on switches can get stuck. I have a mother board that wont come back on after a power outage until I turn the main (hardware) switch off for a minute or so.

[devils casper]

I agree with gogalthorp. Its a Hardware problem only. Restart doesn't work in one of my machine. Its a multiboot (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Fedora) and restart doesn't work in all distros installed in that machine.

[Kelpie]

Is it something to be concerned about? The reboot always worked with XP, it's just now that I am dual booting that it will not work and I have to switch the machine off.

This is a machine I built in 2005.

[gogalthorp]

Not really. If it bother you try it now. Is it still doing it if you select reboot in either OS?

[Kelpie]

Yes. It will not reboot under any circumstance. I have to manually turn the machine off. It had always rebooted before with no problems. It quit being able to reboot when I installed openSUSE.

[linuxforever]

Strange matters!

If it won't reboot from an operating OS, ie hard-drive, one should say it is because of the drive.
You could try to boot from a parted magic boot CD.
And see what the conditions of your drives and partitions are.
You can mount all partitions and see all files both of windows and linux.

If it is because of faulty switches or I/O devices, I do not know.
Ie you could look into your BIOS settings.
But I haven't experienced them yet.

[Kelpie]

I'm thinking that something happened to the drive while I installed open SUSE, since it was fine before.

What should I look for when diagnosing the hard drive? Right now it is booting from the MBR with GRUB.

[gogalthorp]

I doubt it has anything to do with the hard drive. Installing Linux will not change anything in Windows except the boot sector and there is no need to go to the boot sector for a shutdown. It is possible for one or the other OS not to reboot correctly but both of them points to a Mother board issue with the software controlled power switching. It could be I guess that grub does something to the power controller that leave it in a odd state. But I have never ever heard of this before.

[linuxforever]

Well, have you already done a chkdsk /f in windows with the windows partitions?
You can do that in windows in a partition with tools and disk check and automatically fix errors.
Windows cannot do that on the fly, but has to reboot.
It checks for errors and fixes them.

If you boot on parted magic, you can look at all partitions and check them.
Look what partitions are are flagged bootable and do a file check, and so on.