On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 7:50 AM, Carlos E. R.
The other problem is that your first partition is not the windows partition. I don't know if that is viable.
Ok, yeah, I officially screwed up everything now. (...and by lucky accident, I did backup of my research folder) So using GParted live cd I rearranged partitions in such a way that fat32 partition for windows was coming first (primary I guess) and then on my extended I had all partitions for linux. Basically what I did is just moving partitions around without formatting any of them. It went out ok (just as it looked) Then I installed vista. I decided to give a try for vista since xp was rebooting all the time, vista did too, but at some point when it was rebooting, I ejected the cd, so instead of "invalid partition table" error message which xp was used to give before, vista actually loaded and continued to install, I just put the cd back and everything went fine. Now I have vista... expect... I don't have linux anymore. First thing I did was checking if the data was still there, so I loaded with Knoppix Live and data is there which makes me not so freaked out. So that's good news. Then I tried to reinstall GRUB, I put the openSUSE 11 CD in, boot from it, go to system recovery -> advance -> install boot loader, it as it's list it gives me "opensuse 11.0" and "failsafe ...", but no Windows. So my understanding is that GRUB somehow doesn't recognize that I have windows installed now, so if I install it then I wont be able to boot to windows anymore. And it gives me message like (sorry I don't remember what exactly but I can do it again) "Partition table cannot be read automatically so you cannot add resize or move..., you can try to do it manually..." 2. I tried to just go with the clean install, after clicking ok to the same message about partition table. I just did partitions manually (mount windows partition as /windows/C, format linux partition and mount as /, and mount my other partition as /home and that's it). I also tried to do manually GRUB configuration but I have no idea how to add Windows there? Is it just Add -> Image -> (typing name Windows) and put sector /dev/sda1 (where my windows is installed) and that's it? (guys sorry, my English sucks when it comes to long sentences, so if something is not clear I can try to explain in more details) Since I was not sure what to do I just left it like that :-( Actually I have an aside question, given all this I think maybe it will be good idea to give up 100$ for the external hard drive, there is an option of buying one for 500Gb (Comstar 500GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive (HDE5500G/P)) I was wondering if there are known issues with external hard drives and this brand particularly (drivers?) or they usually work? And by the way, and what is really weird, now if I boot from GParted live cd it gives me one big unallocated partition... so it doesn't recognize my partitions at all. So I think my options are. 1. I can try to do fresh install, only on the partition which contains (used to) my linux, create partition table by hand, and then try to add in grub Windows, but I'm not sure how? So adding windows in GRUB is simply Add -> Image (or?) -> Windows /dev/sda2 ? Or I need bunch of options there? 2. I was thinking to get the external drive (but need to figure out first if linux is going to recognize it) try to boot from knoppix and backup all the data, and then wipe out everything and try to install everything from scratch... Thanks a lot for your help, I seem to attract problems more that usual these days :-) Sergey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org