Marc Chamberlin wrote:
I had something go drastically wrong with a Windows XP partition on a dual boot system (with SuSE) which is preventing it (Windows) from booting up properly. So I decided to purchase a second drive and create a new partition on this disk drive and reinstall Windows XP there. To accomplish this, for some darn reason only Microsoft knows, I had to disconnected my original drive in order to reinstall Windows XP on my new second drive, only when it was in the first SATA port position (I suspect this has something to do with the fact that I have an OEM reinstall disk for Win XP but that is only a guess...). I then reconnected the original drive into my second SATA slot. That much was successful and with the new XP I was able to at least read and start recovering files from the old XP partition.
As I MOSTLY use SuSE 10.3 I decided to switch the order of the drives so that my original drive was again the first drive on my system and boot from it. As the boot menu was still referring to the original broken version of Windows XP, I booted up SuSE and attempted to fix GRUB (via YaST) so that it would also let me boot up the new XP partition.
This is where I ran into troubles. Even though I am telling GRUB that the new XP partition is on my second drive, in the first primary partition, /dev/sdb0, it will not boot it up when I select it. Instead it continues to try an boot up the original broken XP that in now located on my first drive /dev/sda0. I even let the YaST boot manager find and suggest the possible operating systems and build a GRUB boot menu, and it properly found both XP partitions and made entries in the boot menu for each. BUT booting either still results in only the first Windows XP partition trying to boot up which as I said fails. If I unplug the drive that has this broken XP and SuSE on it, and reconfigure the SATA cables appropriately, then the new version of Windows XP will boot up fine, so I know there is nothing wrong with it.
So I am lost and confused... Can anyone offer me advise on how to get this stubborn boot loader to do what I want it to? (That is to allow me to boot up my new second Win XP?) I REALLY do NOT want to have to reinstall SuSE as that would be a LOT of work for me!!!
Marc...
This may not be the correct answer but check to see if the entries in /boot/grub/device.map match the devices/locations shown in menu.lst. I did something similar last week on my wife's computer and nothing would boot until (using YaST) I made grub boot from the MBR rather than its own choice during installation of the (?)Boot Partition [or something :-) ]. And just to add to this, the installation details for grub where showing the HDs out of order (ie, first as sdb and second as sda); accordingly grub had the wrong info for where the root partition was located - which is why I am suggesting to check was is in device.map VS menu.lst. HTH. Ciao. -- Past experience, if not forgotten, is a guide for the future. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org