On Saturday 09 December 2006 21:36, Doug McGarrett wrote:

I'm having a problem with a setup using 2 hard drives. hda is XP, hdb is Suse 10.0. If both drives are connected, something is telling the bios that there are NO hard drives connected. If I disconnect hdb, I get a message that the primary hard drive has been detected. Then when the system tries to boot I get a grub failure error. I really don't need Linux on that machine. How can I get the machine to boot into XP without the grub boot error, with the second drive disconnected? I am also having trouble with the CD player on that machine, so it's problematical if I can boot off a CD. (I don't have any kind of backup disk for XP, as far as I remember.) I could have done this with an old Windows, with fdisk mbr, off of a floppy, but I don't know what XP wants.

--doug

Doug, This is a SUSE-centric list. It isn't very good form to ask questions here about solving XP problems. This is definitely an XP problem if you're not intending to recover/preserve your SUSE installation. That being said: Go to http://www.theeldergeek.com/ and research how to restore/reinstall the system's XP boot menu. If you Google, you will quickly find many XP boot diskette images available that you can transfer to floppy and use to boot into XP. If you've installed XP's command line 'recovery console' in parallel with the system, you won't need the original CD to run the console and recover/rebuild/restore the XP boot manager. Good luck! Carl -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 09 December 2006 19:36, Doug McGarrett wrote:

I'm having a problem with a setup using 2 hard drives. hda is XP, hdb is Suse 10.0. If both drives are connected, something is telling the bios that there are NO hard drives connected. If I disconnect hdb, I get a message that the primary hard drive has been detected. Then when the system tries to boot I get a grub failure error. I really don't need Linux on that machine. How can I get the machine to boot into XP without the grub boot error, with the second drive disconnected? I am also having trouble with the CD player on that machine, so it's problematical if I can boot off a CD. (I don't have any kind of backup disk for XP, as far as I remember.) I could have done this with an old Windows, with fdisk mbr, off of a floppy, but I don't know what XP wants.

Since you say you don't have your Windows CD, your only option is to fix your system using Linux. I would start trying to fix the jumpers on the hard disks, as Wade suggested. That's the only reason I can think of for the BIOS not showing the disks. Then run the installation CD again, then after choosing New Installation go into Repair Installed System, or something like that, and try to repair GRUB from there. For instance, you can make your Windows disk as the default option in GRUB, you can try to restore the MBR from the backup that GRUB makes, or you can try saving the boot loader in a different place. Alternatively, you could free up a small partition in the first hard disk and install Suse there to access your personal data on that disk. Carlos FL PS: When you say "you don't need Linux", you should consider the following. For some reason you lost access to your Windows (don't blame it on Linux, as it could be a hardware problem or a mistake you made during installation). And for some reason you don't have the Windows install media that you should have either. Now you are stuck with either buying another Windows CD, even though you were already entitled to it by your previous purchase, and try to fix your problem using Windows or you use your free Suse Linux to fix your problem and at least get access to your personal data stored in NTFS. I say at least access your data, because you don't know yet if your Windows system didn't get corrupted by some HD failure. So, either you spend the money to continue being a Microserf, or you spend some time in this and other Linux forums and exercise your brain and feel empowered without giving MS more money for crap software. Your choice. I made mine, and I don't need Windows! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org