First Linux Install

[sjmayclin]

Hi,

I just installed openSuse 10.2 in a partition of my hdd, in thought of dual booting with my existing windows XP pro intall. As I'm sure you all know, when the GRUB boot manager was installed, it didn't see the windows install.

In my brief searching since then, I've found that ideally, XP would be installed after linux to properly dual boot. Is there a way to get around that and get it to recognize the existing install? Or am I hopeless and i should redo the XP install?

Thanks,
Steve

[Thrillhouse]

Are both of these installs on the same hard drive? If so, SuSE should have had no problem picking up on the XP install. Try booting into the SuSE install and executing the

#fdisk -l

command as root. This will give us a better idea of your hard drive configuration.

In my brief searching since then, I've found that ideally, XP would be installed after linux to properly dual boot.

That's not really true. To set up a dual boot, it's best to have Windows installed on the first partition of the disk (not the MBR) and then have some available space on a second partition that follows the Windows one. In almost all cases, the GRUB boot loader will recognize the Windows install and add it to the menu but it seems like that didn't happen in this case so we'll try to get around it. Re-doing the XP install wouldn't do too much, we can sort this out.

[sjmayclin]

Thanks for the reply.

My hdd is partitioned as follows, taken from the system monitor/file system pane:

device-directory-type-total

debugfs-/sys/kernel/debug-debugfs-0bytes
/dev/sda2-/windows/c-ntfs-72.7gb <Windows partition for date/storage
/dev/sd4a-/-ext3-27.4 <Linux install
/dev/sd5a/-/windows/d-ntfs-9.8gb <Windows system install
securityfs-sys/kernel/security-securityfs-0bytes

I hope this helps. Its all on one 120gb (ie 110gb) drive. The partitioning is kind of weird due to artifacts of reformating the Windows system install partition (which was originally C) while keeping the Windows data/storage partition intact. This caused the relettering which it has now.

Thanks for your help!

-Steve

[devils casper]

what is in sda1 partition? post the output of 'fdisk -l' only. its output will help us to understand your disk's partition structure correctly.
execute this

su -
fdisk -l
less /boot/grub/menu.lst

post the output of these commands.






Casper