On Sat, 2007-01-13 at 17:32 +0100, shanti wrote:

Hi

today i had a typical installation problem that should be maintained better since its a stopper for unexperienced users:

dualboot with suse 10.2 and WinXP .. there was a Windows-Reinstall ( of course) that broke the boot-loader ..

-> so i booted installation-DVD to recover it

ok have to choose "New Installation" .. why this .. i dont want to .. ok anyway .. hidden therein is the recovery-function ( should be a mainmenu-item instead)

i only want to recover the bootloader .. but suse wants the check all available filesystems .. which used to be clean anyway .. so checking them took useless ages

going through further useless checkings .. like "fstab-entries seems to be incorrect" , where the are NOT (ignoring wont get by this popup) .. the recovery of the bootloader failed .. leaving a unexperienced user with a non-working system ( win32 only :-( )

after rebooting into rescue-system, mounting the root-partition .. setting grub-config-file , root and run the setup within grub .. this issue was solved .. but it sucks , since unexperienced users cannot do this on their own

a friend i tried to switch to linux said .. this is definitly a showstopper for him , because windows-reinstalls are monthly/quaterly tasks , and without support from me he couldnt finish this ..

Wow, is his system really that bad? Using NT, 2k, or XP, you can have MicroSoft's bootloader kick you into Linux. There are abundant articles with clearly defined steps out there. One thing though, you'll want a copy of the boot image file from linux put on a disk to make this easier. (Frankly I'd print out the instructions and use a modern bootable Linux distro with NTFS write support built in, to bypass the need for a current image.)

so "Linux sucks" just because lacking a simple clean and working boot-loader-recovery .. (thats not my opinion :-))

Perhaps what we need is a "Windows hosed the bootloader" recovery option.

please , its very important to bring this to a working release , or else SuSE will miss a lot new Users

also i think that a "recovery system" should be more like a minimal live-cd with a good task-related-gui .. but just a basic shell with important features missing

best regards

-c-

I have not really used the recovery system shell. You need to know things about your system, like partitioning info, mounting instructions and chroot instructions, to be able to simply bypass the Repair Tool checks and effect what you want. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-optimize+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-optimize+help@opensuse.org