-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday, 2009-01-07 at 13:38 -0600, L. V. Lammert wrote:
RESOLVED!
It does appear that Grub *itself* has a problem loading into extended partitions, .. as testing with multipel kernels (System Rescue, Nexradix, and SuSE 11.1 Repair & Rescue) found the same problem - Grub itself refuses to accept a logical partition as 'Root'!
To recap:
11.1 initially installed [successfully] as follows:
sda1 Extended sda5 Swap sda6 Root sda7 Home
Er... I notice that you confuse logical and extended partitions. Your sda1 is an extended partition, ie, a primary partition that holds a linked list of as many logical partitions as needed. Numbers 1..4 are primary, numbers 5 onward are logical. And, in your case, your primary 1 is also extended, or if your prefer, a primary of type "extended". That said... Grub does not complain about installing on logical (not extended) partitions. It may... a bit. I have one installed in hda8, and it works. What it should complain strongly is about marking as bootable a logical partition - not because of grub, but because of the bios and/or standard mbr code not being able to boot it. And it will also complain (or should) about installing into an extended partition (not a logical), as you had, because an extended partition has no space of its own where you can save anything at all.
Which ran fine! Unfortunately, formatting sda2 caused Grub to rewrite the boot loader, AND IT HOSED THE SYSTEM (i.e no bootable partitions found)!!
Being that it is not possible to have grub in your original sda1, it was somewhere else, which you probably formatted over.
Given that Grub has a problem with logical partitions, I shuffled them as follows, creating a 512MB /boot partition for Grub:
sda1 Primary (/boot) sda2 Extended sda5 Swap sda6 Root sda7 Home
Looks much better.
Using sda4 temporarily as storage for BUs from Root & Home, .. restoring them to the proper partitions, .. then installing Grub to sda1 /boot restored the system to operation.
The remaining question, however, is HOW THE 11.1 INSTALLER CREATED A WORKING GRUB CONFIGURATION when Grub itself cannot.
Difficult to say without having data about your original installation. I have my guesses, of course. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkllDZ0ACgkQtTMYHG2NR9UDrwCghWHZnZ2zEsMakqN0rXJEFRrU GlkAn17yqFzrAk8aHs/OyOMQZd82NLpG =rQU8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org