http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=613873 http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=613873#c0 Summary: Bootloader is always installed incorrectly on certain system Classification: openSUSE Product: openSUSE 11.3 Version: Factory Platform: x86-64 OS/Version: openSUSE 11.3 Status: NEW Severity: Critical Priority: P5 - None Component: Bootloader AssignedTo: jsrain@novell.com ReportedBy: bugzilla@go4more.de QAContact: jsrain@novell.com Found By: --- Blocker: --- User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; de-DE) AppleWebKit/532.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) rekonq Safari/532.4 I report this bug against 11.3, however, openSUSE has for several versions never ever been able to consistently put the bootloader grub to the correct location as long as I've been using this hardware (several years). On a system with seperate Windows- and Linux-harddisks, grub is very often written to the wrong harddisk, making the system unbootable and sometimes partially damaging the Windows installation (Windows XP repair console necessary - FIXMBR, FIXBOOT). This happens reproducably during new installations: Then grub always complains "/boot/message not found" during the first boot. Using the grub-console, however, "kernel=/boot/vmlinux" and "initrd=/boot/initrd" will find the correct files nevertheless and boot the Linux installation. However, this also happens sometimes during system updates requiring bootloader re-setups. Here I have, with no apparent logic, different results, from no problem to messing up the Windows boot sector. The system consists of two harddisks: 40 GB Harddisk, Windows XP (further referred to as W) 160 GB Harddisk, Linux (L) BIOS order (as reported during BIOS start up): W: Channel 0 (first IDE/PATA-drive) L: Channel 3, (first SATA-drive) Harddisk boot priority (as set up with BIOS settings) First W, then L (i.e. reverse order) The running Linux installation at least recognizes W as /dev/sdb1, L as /dev/sda1, i.e. according to the BIOS priority settings. Expected bootloader installation: MBR is on drive L. Bootloader should be installed here and leave completely W untouched. When booting Windows, only W and L have to be logically swapped with the corresponding grub command in order to make Windows believe to be on the first drive in the system. The openSUSE bootloader installation, however, does seemingly not always recognize the harddisks in the same order: There seem to be situations in which the harddisks are mixed up. Moreover, grub seems to be reluctant to put the bootloader on the 160 GB-drive, complaining about an "128 GB" problem making the system potentially unbootable during new installations. As a user, I have no chance to find out whether the system messes up the bootloader installation or not, as there are no or not enough informations how the system assumes to set up the bootloader. And, even more annoying, there seem to be situations in which a grub installation, manually adapted to be correct, can be changed without warning to be defunct. Any process requiring a bootloader reinstall is a game of chance for mr :( : I don't know which actual drive will be written to if YaST talks about "MBR". I can't tell the bootloader "whatever you think is necessary, simply don't ever touch partition W" During updates which require bootloader reinstalls, this process is completely automatic and gives me no further control. As the problem is probably hard to pinpoint and fix, it would be simply great to have more control over bootloader installation, and the necessary informations (which drive are we talking about now?) to make educated decisions. Reproducible: Always -- Configure bugmail: http://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.