So I bought this fancy new motherboard for my wife's machine, She uses Windows xp because she isn't very adept at computers and doesn't want to have to deal with two different systems (the school system uses xp).
When I tried to find her copy of xp, I couldn't, so I went ahead and installed 11.3. Later, I found the installation disks and installed xp, expecting to do as I had before, booting into the 11.3 install disks.
Tried, failed. I was expecting a vaguely remembered option to "repair installed system", or some such, which isn't on either the net install disk or the complete iso. I'd rather not have to reinstall suse, even if I could be sure that would solve all my problems.
So, googling "suse xp dual boot", I find several references to such a feature on ubuntu and some others, but I also hit a scary comment that substituting the xp bootloader is risky, and it's better to modify it to give the option to boot linux (bkpavan.wordpress.com, apcmag.com, www.wellho.net).
It's been some months, but I set my laptop up with dual-boot using what really looks like the suse grub bootloader. Has something changed, or am I worrying too much, or...? I found several references to dual-boot on the wiki, but they're all about using or setting up something else after the dual-boot is set up.
Where is this "rescue" system referred to in the ubuntu web, and that I clearly remember having before? And is it really so dangerous to simply substitute the xp bootloder with grub?
John Perry (from a new account for my wife's computer)
At the openSUSE forums there is a great deal of info and assistance on this specific kind of problem, including a very good tutorial by one of the moderators. While the expertise on this mailing list is quite excellent, on the forums you'll find this ground has already been covered many times over and the mods have had a heckuva lot of practice. That said . . . If you installed openSUSE first, the installer probably put grub in the MBR with a pointer to the partition which holds openSUSE; that would have been the first primary unless you changed it. Installing XP next but with the first primary already occupied, presumably you directed it/allowed it to create a second primary to install XP to. XP would then over-write the MBR with its own boot code and mark the second partition as "active"; that would result in the machine booting into XP. Is that where you're at now? And yes, you can set up XP to boot openSUSE. The aforementioned tutorial details how. However, if you don't have openSUSE booting now and you presumably did not install grub to the openSUSE partition boot sector but rather to the MBR, you're going to need to do some command line work from the DVD's Rescue System or much better yet, a Live-CD. You're probably going to need to do this anyway, and while you're at it, it would actually be easier to just leave the XP code in the MBR and switch the partition table "active flag" to the openSUSE partition (some users prefer this as it makes reverting boot control to XP easier); that would boot openSUSE and once in you can modify the grub menu to chain-load XP. In a simple disk setup, there's really no advantage and some disadvantage, to using XP to boot Linux. Or, you can just reinstall the OS's, XP first in the first partition. Then when installing openSUSE you can either put grub in the MBR again or you can install it to the partition boot sector using the XP code in the MBR, as just mentioned above. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org