boot into recovery console off win xp cd and run this command:

bootcfg /l to view your OS list
then
bootcfg /rebuild to rebuild it.

After some more research it seems that everything went wrong when linux decided to put GRUB in my recovery partition or so. Anyways, I found a program which would fix my recovery partition by fixing the MBR for my manufacturer's pc.
And yes, that worked! But it destroyed my C-drive
I tried fixmbr,fixboot,bootcfg and all that on the C-drive, and the final result was a directory listing with lots of nice characters I've never seen before...yes, corrupted.
But at least my recovery partition was accessible again and I could do a so-called destructive system recovery.

Weird things again...my 1st harddisk is 120GB, the recovery partition takes about 2GB...and the C drive is now 30something GB....and the rest of it is unused. I would have thought a system recovery would take things back to how it was when I bought the computer. I haven't tried enlarging my partition yet, hopefully that won't destroy everything again.

Anyways...how can I now successfully repair Suse on my second harddisk? (the system recovery didn't change anything on this disk, luckily)

Is is just that GRUB thing which I should not install in the MBR? Or is there more to it? I found an article on the net about someone with an IBM pc who also has a system recovery partition. In that article it says to install GRUB to the linux /boot section and use some kind of dos/windows bootmanager to resolve the dualboot problem.

Is this the way to go?

Btw, I would like to keep my recovery partition if possible.

why is it so complicated?
just back up all your stuff,
use maxboot floppy to do a complete formatting of your HDD, make it clean and start installing the OS you want.

download the powermax here
http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=22

Is your PC a sony or an HP?

You mentioned recovery partition. I will tell you now if you lose that recovery partition and do not have the OS disk it is a pain to get it back. Especially if its an HP. You have to run a DMI tool on the HD to get the system to even recognize the drive, and then you have to have the factory disks to put back the partitions with the recovery partition on it.

I used to work for a warranty service provider for computers. So, I used to deal with all that stuff all the time, now I am doing the same thing but more on an enterprise level.

Just curious what kind of PC do you have?

My problem with just getting rid of the recovery partition is the warranty. My computer comes with a 3 year warranty, but it also says that if changes were made to the recovery partition by for example trying to install another operating system, the warranty would become invalid. So, that's why I would like to keep that recovery partition.

My computer is not from a major international manufacturer, it's dutch and they use some kind of special bootsector in their recovery partition (which was probably 'infected' by linux in the install process).

Weird though that the recovery kind of made a mess of my first harddisk. I had to use partition magic to fix an error and make my systempartition as big as it should be (there was lots of unallocated space).

Anyways, I decided to go with VMWare instead of trying to make this a dual boot thingie. For the purposes I want to use it for, VMWare is probably the right choice anyways (purpose: setting up and playing around with oracle db on a linux system, including client/server possibilities).

But again, I would like to thank all of you for your help and suggestions

if that is the need, you can downlaod the configed vm from oracle directly, save you some time:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tec...are/index.html

Thanks for the link! This will help speed things up