Let me start by saying I have always had this same problem with every version of SuSE I have installed, sinc 9.1:

I had to reinstall WinXP, and now my GRUB bootloader is gone, which is to be expected, however:

When I try to repair it, using either the auto OR the custom repair options off of the install disk, I run into fstab entries problems. Right now I am trying to recover the bootloader for SuSE 10.1 x64, WinXP, & WinVista.

I get these issues:

ignore (or remove, neither works) debugfs /sys/kernal/debug no auto

and

ignore /(or remove, neither works) /dev/sda2 /data2 vfat yadda yadda (it's for my iPod)

When it does:

"Check Package Database"

It tells me that all of the hard drives cannot be mounted.

Can someone tell me how I can repair, or rebuild, or build a new bootloader WITHOUT having to do a fresh install?

Someone told me to "chroot" into into SuSE, but when I do a man chroot command, it doesn't say anything about how to use it really, so I have no idea how to do it.

PLEASE, can someone help me on this? Thanks.

Try this:

Boot from suse dvd and choose "rescue system". I assume you know which partition is your root partition. Login as root and do this:

cd /mnt/
mkdir suse
mount /dev/hda2 suse (/dev/hda2 should be your root partition)
mount -t proc /proc suse/proc
chroot suse
grub-install /dev/hda (/dev/hda should be the place where grub should be installed)
exit
reboot

when I type in mkdir suse it says connect create directory suse, read only...

I just had this same problem with SuSE 10.1.

Here is what I did to get it fixed (directions as stated above do not work, but are on the right track).

1) Boot from your SuSE installation disk and choose 'recover system'

2) Login as 'root'

3) Figure out which partitions your linux installation is on (I only had one which was hda6) My configuration is as follows on my laptop hda1=winxp, hda2=extended, hda5=fat32, hda6=/. Note that I only have 1 linux partition.

4) Since by default you cannot create new directories within the recover environment you are going to mount you linux installation to /mnt. Then we will need to bind some critical system directories before we chroot.

5) Commands are as follows....
mount /dev/hda6 /mnt
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
chroot /mnt

6) Now you should be chroot'd to your linux installation and you are ready to install grub however you need to. My grub-install command went like this....

grub-install --no-floppy --force-lba --recheck /dev/hda6


I installed to my partition instead of the bootsector because my Toshiba BIOS causes GRUB to hang before it loads its splash screen. So my work around is to strip the first 512 bytes off of /dev/hda6 after I install grub to it and save it to a file. That file I put in my C:\ and call it from my Boot.ini

So my boot chain looks like Poweron->ToshibaBIOS->NTLOADER/BOOT.INI on hda ->GRUB

So the NTLOADER actually has to kick over to GRUB.

Here is a link with better instructions for that part http://www.highlandsun.com/hyc/linuxboot.html <--I have not made 3 posts yet so it doesn't like me putting URL's in :-(

And yes, with Ubuntu and RedHat I never had to do more thant boot to recovery system and chroot to /mnt/sysimage because it was already mounted for me. It was a bit of a surpirse that SuSE hadn't already done it.

My root is /dev/hda6, and /boot is /dev/hda8

I tried the above steps, and got:

...

Any idea of what to try next?