Boot Loader issues with 10.2

[thewhitefedora]

I have an Acer Aspire 3003WLCi.
I'm running it with a 30gb internal drive and a 80gb external drive.(I wanted linux on the larger drive an I don't know of a way to install windows externally.)
On boot, the bios recognizes both drives, the 20g as a hard disk, and the 80g as USB:HitachiModelNumber.
I installed openSUSE 10.2 with heavily tested media and it completed the installation without errors, and restarted my computer. On reboot however, I got a message that read Starting GRUB...1.5......Error 21. I ran the installation disk and selected the Repair installation option. It was unable to install GRUB on the MBR, or anywhere else. I rebooted and from the installation cd, booted openSUSE 10.2, and using a boot loader program in the system category, attempted to install the bootloader again. It returned not one message saying it had failed or completed. I restarted only to find Error 21 printed out on the screen before me.

Please help me, I've tried all I know how to do.

[devils casper]

where did you install GRUB? select MBR of External Disk and in BIOS, 'first boot device' should be External Harddisk.










casper

[thewhitefedora]

I had tried that, I eventually scrapped the idea of using windows.

[gogalthorp]

I had tried that, I eventually scrapped the idea of using windows.

You might wat to try installing windows in a virtual machine. I use VMWare Server (free) and it is great. Note when installing be sure you put the virtual maichine directories on a partition with plenty of space. The default is root and there is not normally a lot of space set up on that partition.

[cactus.ed]

Please help me, I've tried all I know how to do.

I got the same error. Grub did not install correctly for me and it did not setup my menu.lst file correctly either. My system was a bit more complicated as I am currently booting Windows, Slackware, Suse 10.1 and Suse 10.2. Here is what I did

Boot with the install CD, a couple screens in there is an "other" option that lets you boot a previously installed system. Boot Suse 10.2 using this option.

After Suse is booted, go to the command line and type:

# "grub"

it should then give you the "grub>" prompt.

Assuming you installed Suse to the first partition of your first drive, type:

grub> "root (hd0,0)"

If you installed Suse to a different partition, you will need to modify the location.

then type:

grub> "setup (hd0)"

This writes grub to the MBR on drive (hd0). You may need to edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst file. This should fix your Grub problems.

-nate