Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2268 mails)

[John <john_82@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have had several really bad days getting this machine up and running. Rough 
history is as follows. Any comments? Going on web searches many people seem 
to have had the same sort of problem. In my case things seem to be worse 
following a change to none raid with xp is on disk 1.with an additional ntfs 
partion on disk 0.

Disks were fake raided which caused the installer to give grub something it 
couldn't cope with. All files were correctly installed. I unraided them and 
suse still insisted it was a raid disk. I deleted the device mapper 
partitioning from the set up. Got the black screen of death the 1st time I 
did it. 2nd time it accepted it but still got the same grub failure. Then 
used NT to rewrite the boot sectors and things got a bit better. The 
suggested installation seemed to get better each time I tried it. I 
eventually managed to get  a suse install to look like I wanted it to. It 
made use of a pre existing swap partition that it had put there itself 
several installs ago. But does it boot - no. Will it dual boot no. It still 
insisted that the xp partition was on disk 0 even though I swapped over the C 
and D drive mappings. The suse boot screen now shows 2 windows installations! 
Maybe one of them works I haven't tried them yet. I'm getting there with 
bootmagic.

I must have done at least 10 installs in total and it still isn't correct so I 
may have to manually install grub to tidy things up. Bootmagic wont boot xp 
either even though I've told it where it is. Same problem.

The really bad thing about this is that the grub install comes very late in 
the process well after the point where all of the software is installed. A 
bit late in the day if there are going to be problems. It wastes a lot of 
time.

All in all it leaves me thinking that the installers assume a windows user 
trying linux with one disc in the machine - not raided. And that they don't 
look at the drives in the right way or take sufficient notice of what the 
user wants to do. Also why ask me to define a /boot when I've defined /.  
Seem's quote " I'm bound to have problems if I don't " No wonder suse is 
going down in the rankings.

Having used suse 9.?, 10.0 and now 10.3 it seems that this area is getting 
worse. 10.0 had no problems at all with intel raid and made it clear that it 
would pack of my existing installation into another directory. 10.3 did 
something different. Right at the end it noticed a home directory  with my 
user name and changed the ownership for me. Fine in this case but what if it 
had been 10.0. I might just be installing because I've re arranging or 
updating my machine. I was but I could equally well be updating everything.

John

Out of interest a number of people on the web seem to think that ntldr is the 
way forwards. It just needs a little prog a la wubi to send things the right 
way. I've tried to use the same code but it seems to be hard wired. I could 
make use of the wubi actual grub install but don't expect to keep it. Wubi 
has no problems at all with disk mappings by the way.
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