On 9/13/2010 7:36 PM, dwgallien wrote:
...At the openSUSE forums there is a great deal of info and assistance on this specific kind of problem, including a very good tutorial by one of the moderators. While the expertise on this mailing list is quite excellent, on the forums you'll find this ground has already been covered many times over and the mods have had a heckuva lot of practice. That said . . .
Forums are frustrating for me because people are always telling me to wait a while and so-and-so, "who really knows about all this", should be on soon. Or I find I'm the only one on. Or, there's a list of people on, but no one responds. Or, ...
If you installed openSUSE first, the installer probably put grub in the MBR with a pointer to the partition which holds openSUSE; that would have been the first primary unless you changed it. Installing XP next but with the first primary already occupied, presumably you directed it/allowed it to create a second primary to install XP to. XP would then over-write the MBR with its own boot code and mark the second partition as "active"; that would result in the machine booting into XP. Is that where you're at now?
Exactly.
And yes, you can set up XP to boot openSUSE. ... In a simple disk setup, there's really no advantage and some disadvantage, to using XP to boot Linux.
I'd used gparted to mark both partitions active, hoping that would set me up. It didn't occur to me to make linux the only active partition. I'll also download a live disk, since I've seen it recommended for other uses, too.
Or, you can just reinstall the OS's, XP first in the first partition. Then when installing openSUSE you can either put grub in the MBR again or you can install it to the partition boot sector using the XP code in the MBR, as just mentioned above.
This is how I got my laptop set up. If all else fails, this is exactly what I'll do. Thanks. jp -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org