Dual booting Suse and XP with windows bootloader
 

Hi peeps.

I'm trying to get Suse 10.1 to dualboot with XP. I can do this no problem with grub, but I need it to load from the XP bootloader... Simple... or so I thought.

I have 1 HDD so I split into partitions. I installed XP on the 1st partition, and suse on sda5 to sda7... I ended up with the following partition setup.
/dev/sda1 ==> XP (NTFS) (primary & bootable)
/dev/sda2 ==> Clean (Fat32) (primary)
/dev/sda5 ==> Linux (Swap)
/dev/sda6 ==> Linux (reiser ==> /)
/dev/sda7 ==> Linux (reiser ==> /home )

I installed grub on /dev/sda6, ran "dd if=/dev/sda6 of=/linux.bin bs=512count=1", and copied linux.bin to the windows root partition. I then added the following line to boot.ini: "c:\linux.bin" = "Suse Linux 10.1"

I thought that would be it... but Nooooo... that would be to easy!! After rebooting the Windows selection works, but when I select Suse I get en error message and the system reboots:

"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information."

Any Ideas?

If you have had GRUB loaded in the boot sector of the first hard drive, then the Windows boot loader will be overwritten. If you put it back, then you will need a Windows compatible boot manager to be able to dual boot Suse. I used Boot Magic which came with Partition Magic 7, but it was too clunky, and now I use GRUB to dual boot XP & Suse and it works fine. If you have to use XP as your default, you can set that in GRUB. I have an old laptop for testing with Win98 & Kubuntu booting with GRUB. Win98 is set as the default and it works fine.

If you must boot XP then you need to boot to a DOS prompt somehow aand use fdisk. I think the command line to restore the boot sector is: >fdisk /mbr

Haven't needed to do that for a while, and I have no idea how to boot XP to a DOS prompt!

Thanks for the reply, however...

The master bootsector and the Windows bootsector's are fine. I can boot into windows with no problem from the "windows OS selection screen" (that's why I installed grub on sda6). I can only boot into Linux if I boot with the the Installation CD. The problem occurs when I select the Linux option from the "windows OS selection screen".