Thanks. Anders just pointed out I should have gone into the installation option instead of the recovery option. A Windows install will remove LILO or GRUB from the MBR, but will not affect your previously installed Linux system. Therefore, booting from
Ok. I did what you said and was able to successfully log into my old
system. I tested several things out and everything seems to be just as it
was. The only thing left is to re-install grub into the MBR. Now that I
know my Linux system is sounds, I think I will postpone that step. Right
now I'm trying to recover my Windows system and that is a more difficult
task. I successfully installed Windows off the Windows CD and then managed
to get the latest backup onto that stripped down (no drivers) system and ran
the restore from that backup. It seemed to work fine, but now, every time I
start it, it keeps going through a sequence like --
1) Start boot
2) Show the Windows startup screen
3) flash the BIOS
4) Restart
5) go through 1-4 again (though sometimes it doesn't restart but simply
shows the Windows startup screen again immediately after the previous flash.
In watching what happens on my hardware, it would appear that it's testing
various devices each time (Video Card, mouse, keyboard, etc.). I only have
about 6 different things that would need BIOS confirmation (keyboard, mouse,
monitor, USB, CD, floppy). I'm beginning to think that it's going trough my
entire registry and anytime it sees a piece of hardware referenced, it's go
back to the BIOS to get a confirmation that the Bios that it sees in the
registry is one that DELL has in it's machine firmware (making sure the link
can be connected during a real Windows session). Since it's testing each of
these hardware devices over and over, I guess it's simply going through the
entire registry and sending these back down to the BIOS one at a time. Why
in the hell wouldn't it just sort the list down to get the 5 or 6 unique
entries and then just test each of those once!! If I'm the BIOS, at some
point I'd abort and put out the following message --
Windows keeps asking me to check the same damn devices over and over again.
I've had it with this turkey. Dell is shutting down!
All of this leaves me where I don't want to go ahead and get grub
reinstalled until this process is complete. Once I put grub in, I would
have to be sitting at the machine so I could cursor down to the Windows
entry on the Linux start-up screen each time this Bios flash happened. It
would be like Chinese water torture. The machine went through that loop
beginning early yesterday evening and was still doing it at 1PM today! I
may have to go on a week or two vacation to allow this thing to get through
all of those registry entries.
Thanks for the good information.
Yours truly,
Greg Wallace
-----Original Message-----
From: Jerry Feldman [mailto:gaf@blu.org]
Sent: Wednesday, August 18, 2004 5:26 AM
To: suse-linux-e@suse.com
Subject: Re: [SLE] Urgent! Need help!
On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:20:52 -0800
"Greg Wallace"