On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 21:21 +0100, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Friday 30 November 2007 12:32:21 Dave Howorth wrote:
I'm trying to install 10.3 on a 4-year old 32-bit machine. I don't do enough installs to remember all the gotchas, so it's always a fraught process if anything goes wrong :(
I blew a 10.3 DVD, verified it and ran the installer. It all went happily and eventually started installing the packages so I went home and left it to it. This morning I came in to find
Missing operating system
The 10.3 system installs the boot loader to the partition containing /boot, leaving a standard MBR that does nothing except hand over to the partition marked "bootable" in the partition table.
Thanks for this. It's useful. Is there anywhere I can read more?
My guess is that you have the wrong partition marked as bootable.
I don't think so. The /boot partition is marked bootable on that disk and the other disk has a partition with the dreaded lilo marked bootable. I don't see any evidence that either is being reached.
Boot the rescur system, run fdisk -l, and see which partition has a * in the Boot column. If it's the wrong one, you can change it with the "a" command in fdisk
On the other hand, if it's the right one, there is something wrong with your MBR. You can use YaST to set this by enabling the option to install a standard MBR in the bootloader installation section
Agreed, I'd already launched the rescue system and used cfdisk to check the bootable partitions :) On Monday, I'll find time to try patching the MBR but I'll use the grub-based method I found on a web page first. Given that the Suse installer / YaST messed it up in the first place, and that Suse's repair system is broken, I don't trust it to fix it! Once the illusion of magic is shattered, I prefer to get my hands into the dirt and see just what's there.
You should however be able to finish your install by booting the installation system again and selecting "boot installed system" when it asks you what you want to do. Once it completes you can log in, run YaST, and reinstall the boot loader, with the correct option
But try fdisk first
Anders
Thanks Anders. I'll let you know how it goes on Monday.
Madness takes its toll
Ain't that the truth! Cheers, Dave -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org