On 12/14/2008 02:28 AM, Jerry Houston wrote:

I was really excited when I got permission from my manager to install a disk drive in one of my computers at work and experiment with using Linux instead of Server 2008. The machine is used for two purposes only -- as a Hyper-V host for various specialized workstations, and as a file and printer server.

Nothing there that couldn't be done well by SuSE Linux, it seemed to me. And I could quit shutting down all my VMs and rebooting the host server every time Microsoft made yet another attempt to make Windows safe to use.

So I installed a 750 GB drive for openSuSE 11.0. Because it was an experiment at first, I wanted to leave the original drives alone, and be able to dual- boot. If the experiment succeeded, I'd change over to Linux only, but if it didn't work out for some reason, I could remove the new drive and the server should be back as it was before.

Because of the order of the SATA connections, the new drive I added became sda to Linux. The original drives, now sdb and sdc, were mounted as /windows/c and /windows/d, respectively. Both are apparently intact, and are accessible from the Linux file system.

This seems to have changed the BIOS ordering of the drives, which would make the Windows boot.ini file out of sync. If I were you I would not panic, but see if the BIOS has a boot option to change the boot device. If so, specifically choose the drive Windows 1 is on to boot from and see if it boots. If it does, I would use the BIOS to dual boot instead of grub. If you have to change the Windows files to allow it to boot while you have your new 750 GB drive in the system, then remove the drive, you would need to change it back by using a rescue console within Windows. Bios is easier.

I expected the GRUB loader to list Windows as a startup option, but in fact, it listed Windows 1 and Windows 2, presumably because of the two NTFS drives. But neither one actually boots. (I only expected Windows 1 to boot, because that was the original C: drive.)

If the BIOS will do it, I would remove both Windows entries from the menu.lst.

I've done dual-boot systems before, with SuSE Linux and Windows, without ever having such a problem.

But has the disk order changed before?

I could fix the problem by re-installing Windows (and possibly even without re-installing, if I can figure out what recovery utility to use), but it seems to me that doing that would only give me Windows without Linux. And if I reinstalled Linux again afterwards, it seems likely that I'd end up back where I am now.

I am pretty sure Windows would have seen its boot drive as disk1 before, now it is disk2 with respect to the BIOS. I do not think Linux has done anything wrong, nor is Windows messed up at all. It is simply which drive was bootable first (and thus sda or disk1)

Does anybody have an idea what I should try next? Or where I can find out what the GRUB entry should look like in order to boot the original Windows C: drive? Apparently what the SuSE installer put there isn't correct.

I suspect it is correct, but Windows is looking at disk1 for its boot files and cannot find them there.

I don't want to look like an idiot to my manager, and I was hoping that my experiment might eventually lead to our using Linux for a lot of our file and printer servers, not just my machine. Seems like every week that we need to install updates that require rebooting the servers.

Hope this helps you in your quest. -- Joe Morris Registered Linux user 231871 running openSUSE 10.3 x86_64 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org