the same old dual boot (winXp and linux) question/problem

[michaellouis]

This seems to be a very common problem and I saw a couple of threads answering at least some of this question but I can't seem to find the ones I found most helpful now that I actually want to fix this issue. And the ones that I find don't seem to exactly address the same issue, and i'm trying not to be overly cautious because things are at least working well right now so I don't want to mess anything up. So sorry to bring this all up again but I'm having trouble with dual booting between WinXP and Linux).

Trying to make a long story short and having a bunch of trial and errors to install linux.

I have windows XP on an 80 gig hard drive which is now the second hard drive (hdd 0) and I installed successfully opensuse 10.2 on a 320 gig hard drive which is the first hard drive (hdd 0 in the bios).

If I tell the bios which hard drive to boot from, I can get opensuse and windows xp to work perfectly.

However, If I boot up to the first hard drive with opensuse and choose to boot up windows or tell opensuse to restart and boot windows, I get the common "NTLDR is missing" error.

I read here and was told that windows doesn't like being on the second harddrive, so i tried so switch the hard drive order, but when it tries to boot linux now, it gives the

resume device /dev/hd5 not found (ignoring)
waiting for device /dev/hda5 to appear ... not found exiting to /bin/sh

so I put the hard drives back into the original order and everything works fine again except I have to choose the hard drives in the bios.

like I said, I'm a total newbie, and it seems to be a problem in the Grub, but I really don't even know much about how to look at this or change it, and I'm kind of afraid to change anything without knowing what exactly to do.

I'm really sorry to ask what seems to be the same question over and over again, but everything is working at least and I'm afraid to make anything worse. I've used windows all my life, so i really feel like a fish out of water here.

[devils casper]

Hi michaellouis !

Welcome to the LinuxForums. check this thread.

EDIT: that thread is for Fedora. SuSe uses menu.lst file instead of grub.conf. edit /boot/grub/menu.lst file.





Casper

[michaellouis]

so, super newbie question, what's the best way to open/edit these files

and thanks so much for the help, and the welcome!

[iamme]

nano /&&&/&&&/&&&

nano is the editor

&&&/&&&/&&& is the file you need to edit

do this in your command line

[the bassinvader]

nano doesn't work for me.

What about VI?

[michaellouis]

i ended up using kate.

i don't know if that was the right thing, but it worked and now everything works perfectly.

thanks so much for the help again.

one last question, there is an extra entry that is called windows (which i imagine was the previous thing that didn't work) in the boot loader. I just added windows xp as a seperate entry and that works fine. I figure that was put in before, I imagine by the suse installer and it was the thing that was giving me my NTLDR error. Could i just delete these lines for windows, or delete the entry in the boot portion in yast or could this cause problems.

[devils casper]

yes ! you can delete those lines. best way is put # sign before those lines.






Casper