Dual boot nightmare

[Jonny87]

Here is my situation I'm trying to get OpenSuse 11.2 to dual boot with windows 7. I have "/home" on a separate partition formated in NTFS so that I can share it with windows 7. However when i try to boot OpenSuse, I can't seem to login. It comes up with "kstartupconfig error 3". I can only login to my account through consol login. I can login graphically as root though. I'm thinking it's something to with NTFS and permissions as when I view the permissions of my home folder it comes up as owner=root & group=user, I cant seem to change the owner back to me though I can't change any of the permission settings for that. The reason I think it NTFS causing the trouble is because the root directory is on an ext4 partition and root logs in fine.

Also I cant seem to boot Windows 7 either even though it shows up on the grub menu. so i cant check the partition from there either. but thats not my main concern I want to at least get OpenSuse working properly then I work on getting win7 to boot.

I'm about to use an 11.3 DVD to try and upgrade to see if that fixs the issues. But if anyone has any ideas or knowledge on whats happening please let me know how I can fix it. I kind of need it working by tomorrow morning. please help.

[yancek]

I have "/home" on a separate partition formated in NTFS so that I can share it with windows 7.

I don't believe that will work as you will need a Linux filesystem for the files in your /home directory. What you can do if you want a separate home partition is create a separate /data partition to share with Opensuse and win 7.

Can you post your partition information, login as root to a terminal and run the command: fdisk -l (lower case Letter L) and post it here along with the contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

[gogalthorp]

Do not use a NTFS partition for home!!!! It is fine to have a common NTFS partition but by default NTFS mount as read only, so can not be /home!!!!! You can change that if you have a working system but first you must have a working system.

Also the the NTFS driver in Linux are good but not perfect. If you have a dirty NTFS partition it will not mount in Linux. Thus if Windows breaks or is improperly shut down Linux would be broken......

All and all a very bad idea.

To see why Windows does not boot as root post output of
fdisk -l (that is a lower case L not a one)

And
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

Upgrading to 11.3 will not help. Your partitioning is fundamentally wrong

[Segfault]

To sum it up, filesystem you are using for /home must be POSIX compliant. NTFS is not.

[Jonny87]

What you can do if you want a separate home partition is create a separate /data partition to share with Opensuse and win 7.

I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier, I've done this in the past with fstab modified to mount bind the folders at boot time. I'll try this now, thanks.

[gogalthorp]

yes but the home partition must be a Linux file system. You can then hang a NTFS files system off any point you want in your home