[seekermeister]

SuSe started booting up to a black screen with a non-blinking cursor, so I just finished a automatic repair installation of it. The only problem that it found was with Postfix, which I doubt had anything to do with the problem at hand. But, this accomplished nothing, still a dead black screen. I will probably just do a fresh install, but before I do, I wanted to see if anyone could suggest a better way?

If I do a fresh install, it may not be with SuSe, but one or more of some other distros that I have. If I install more than one, this raises the question of Grub. Will sequential distros automatically update Grub properly to include all OSs, or is this something that I would have to attend to manually?

[saikee]

Originally Posted by seekermeister

Will sequential distros automatically update Grub properly to include all OSs, or is this something that I would have to attend to manually?

Answer: Some do and some don't

[seekermeister]

Originally Posted by saikee

Answer: Some do and some don't

I would prefer not to learn by trial and error, do you happen to know which would or won't?

[saikee]

The Debian installer always tries to set up a Grub menu to boot all the distros after it discovered them in my PC. I think it manged to pick up over 60 systems the last time.

Xandros uses Lilo and has attempted to compile a menu to boot every system it found in my PC too.

The bad news is the installer may not be as clever as you think. Xandros did compile a nice menu but its installer never checked with Lilo to discover it has a ceiling limit and can't boot more than 27 images so the menu was useless.

Anyway it is in fact simpler and easier to amend the Grub menu yourself.

Step 1 : Amend the /boot/grub/menu.lst of Linux control the MBR to include the extra Linux you want to install. Say you are going to put a distro in hda8 then just add these lines for booting this new Linux

title My Linux in hda8
root (hd0,7)
chainloader +1

Step 2 : Install the 2nd Linux (or 3rd, 4th....) but tell the installer to install the boot loader in its root partition of hda8

Step 3 : You will find the new Linux bootable immediately after you install it.

Step 4 : If the Linux use Lilo it will still boot by the Grub controlling the MBR and makes no differece at all.

Step 5 : You can install as many distros as you like and the procedure is bomb proof.

If you still have a booting problem take a peep at the last link of my signature.

Lastly GRub counts from 0 so the first bootable disk hda is known as (hd0) and its first partition is known as (hd0,0). Therefore hda8 is called (hd0,7) by Grub.

[seekermeister]

I think that I understand all that you have said, but one thing still confuses me. When I installed SuSe, it had an option not to touch the MBR. Am I correct in think that this means that it was self-contained in it's own root partition? The reason that this throws me is that I once had a boot problem with Grub, and even if I removed the SuSe drive and left only the XP drive installed, XP still wouldn't boot. If I remember clearly, I think that the MBR got place on a nonOS drive that I have.

If I understood what you said, the first Linux distro should be on the MBR and following distros self-contained in their own partitions...Do I have this right, or am I off in left field?

EDIT: I found your link about booting Linux from the slave harddrive, but I'm still trying to digest it. It appears that you are saying to leave the slave drive as first in the boot sequence, changing Grub to boot Windows simply by remapping the drive. If I understood this correctly, that's probably the reason that I got fouled up before, because I installed Linux on the slave drive, but I never changed the boot sequence. If this sounds like rambling, I understand.

[saikee]

Until it is told not to a PC on a boot up a PC will try to read off the first 512 bytes of the first bootable hard disk, commonly refer to as the MBR.

The first 512 bytes is part of the boot sector and together with the filing index of a partition are not part of a filing system. Thus destroying a partition will not erase its boot sector. That is why Grub still appears. However Grub cannot proceed further because its information in the /boot/grub directory has been removed by you.

When you remove Suse you only remove the filing system (or even remove the partition) but the first 512 bytes are untouched. The MBR can only be "overwritten" by another boot loader, which is another way of saying restoring the MBR.

Every partition has a boot sector and so you can let the Linux boot loader live in it. You can at any time select any of the boot loader to take over the MBR. By having the boot loader available inside the boot sector changes nothing to your Linux. Most users do not even know what to do with the first sector of every partition.

Once installed a Linux should not be altered in the disk order. This is because Linux refers the 4 connection points of the two IDE channel as hda, hdb hdc and hdd. Thus having installed a Linux in hda disk it will fail to boot if you hook it the the slave position to become hdb. It causes the kernel to search the files in the wrong location. Typically the /etc/fstab in a Linux tells what files the kernel must load during a boot up. If you install the Linux in hda the files names in /etc/fstab will all pointing to hda. You need to alter all of file references in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst if you change the disk order of the Linux.

XP records its installation position too but using only the disk number. Both Grub and Lilo provide disk re-ordering commands so that the disk numbers are swapped on-the-fly during a booting process. Therefore you can install a XP in a primary drive and can still boot it with Grub or Lilo after hooking the XP disk as a slave.

[seekermeister]

Something that I still don't understand. In the incident that I described, I not only removed SuSe, but before that, I tried to use the repair function to restore some indexes that apparently became corrupted. When that failed, is when I removed SuSe. Since the original installation was directed not to touch the MBR, I had assumed that meant that Grub would not be located there either. After that, I also attempted to use the Recovery Console in XP to repair the MBR, but that failed also. That is one of the reasons that I assumed that the MBR had been located on a non-system drive. However, It appears that you said that the MBR is a function of XP, and since it was installed before the other drives were connected, I assumed that the MBR would have been on the same drive. When this went haywire was after installing both of the systems, I connected the non-system drive, and attempted to change it's identify in Suse. This threw everything in a whirl. Needless to say, I have learned to become much more cautious now. But, what ever happened, if SuSe didn't mess with the MBR in the first place by putting Grub there, it would appear that none of this would have happened. This may well just be part of my continuing ignorance, and I may have missed a point that you already explained, but I really do want to understand it.

[seekermeister]

Something just happened that relates to what I was talking about above. Because of something not directly related to this, I tried to test the cloned installation of XP that I have installed on another harddrive. This went badly, but that is not why that I'm mentioning it. In the process of troubleshooting, When I only had the cloned harddrive connected and tried to boot to it, I got a Grub error screen. Since this harddrive has been blank until I cloned it, I would have thought that Grub would not have touched it, therefore how could I get a Grub error screen?

[saikee]

One important thing to remember in both XP and Linux installation is that each OS will enshrine the location how it is originally installed. Any attempt to alter the disk afterward can render the OSs unbootable because the installed files would be in the wrong locations. It is possible that your XP restoration of the MBR failed this way.

To keep the matter simple just unplug the Linux disk when you install the MBR for the XP. Have that system running satisfactory before attempting adding the Linux disk.

By the way if you keep Suse's Grub off the MBR then you PC can only boot to XP. Therefore the only way you can boot Suse is to let its Grub to take over the MBR. It is possible to let XP's NTLDR to boot Suse but you need 10 times more effort than allowing Grub into the MBR.

If you have installed Suse perfectly and denied its GRub access to the MBR you should end up with Xp exactlt as before. The Suse will only boot manually by a bootable Grub floppy or CD.

Lastly if you have cloned your XP successfully it will work only in its original condition. That is to say you must unplug the master xp disk and give its position to the cloned disk.