paul_e_t, I have 2 HDDs, one 120G that has 3 NTFS partitions( winxp pro, winxp pro 64 bit-this is beta as you know and one for games ),
and the other one 40G is for Suse 9.2. I have been using Suse since the 8.1 version and that (9.1) was the first time i had a dual booting problem.As you did , i tried to fix the problem according their proposition at Suse's web page but nothing happened. The last six months i have been reading almost every thread about that particular problem with no result at all. I will do a clean setup within the next few days and i will let know the results. Thanks.

Did you try changing your read/write mode for your HDA1 to LBA? You will lose hard drive space over time as this was used to achieve the 4 GB threshold, and for hard drivers over 40 GB's will cause you to lose some space over time, but not too much. Should fix your dual booting problems though.

mimika:
Me also. There is a fix using sfdsk and fdsk interactively. Have you tried that fix? If not I'll send you the url or method. I'm going to try this fix this week. It rewrites the HD data so it sounds like it will work. I picked up on it two weeks ago and so far no one has made any complaints about it.
My problem is that I cannot reinstall XP since I have an OEM pre install and cannot get to NTFS to do anything, even making a backup. So if I try to reinstall and something goes astray I"m out of luck in a bad way.
I cannot enable LBA since my HP bios does not have it. So, I need to be carefull. I'll get back to you.
SuSE 9.2 is in the distribution sys and should be here soon. I sent an email to SuSE asking if the parted program has been fixed in 9.2 but no reply yet. Oh, SuSE got the parted program from Red Hat so I believe that problem will show up in anyone who uses the same parted prog.

Paul, I didn't try that fix because everything worked fine for me. I had had winxp pro+winxp64 already installed in the first disk and then i set up SUSE 9.2. at the second disk. I accepted the propositions that GRUB did for me and finally everything worked perfect! I have now( after all that time of setting up and then loosing everything and then setting up again..) a dual booting system. Grub is the boot manager. I thought that may be that was a coicidence and i did a clean set up at another computer i have. This time there was ONE disk 120G. I partioned the disk with windows,i installed winxp pro and then Suse 9.2. The result was the same.Everything worked perfect! Since you have not bought SUSE 9.2 yet, please buy the full version just in case. ps:I have the same LBA problem with my bios.

KohlyKohl, I cannot enable LBA since my HP bios does not have it , but dual booting under Grub works now perfect for me. Thank you for your concern.

Hi all
I missed this problem with the 9.1 pro version, and I have a 160GB disc. The reason I missed it was I always, always divide a large disk into smaller partitions and leave some unallocated space, before installing any operating system. I did have a problem with a bad IDE controller chip on an ASrock K7S8X board but that manifested itself in several ways one of which was the inability to transfer data from DVD backup disc to data partitions and vice versa.
I installed SUSE into 30GB of unallocated space and there were no problems.

Mad Malc

Removed my post because it was redundant. Apologies.

Hello:

Apparently, I have a more fundamental problem,
with attempting to install SuSE 9.1 on
a machine with Windoze XP!

I have a brand new out of the box Dell machine,
with Windoze taking the entire huge hard drive
(160 GB). my partition table currently, has a small
FAT partition, a small FAT32 partition, and a huge
NTFS one... and SuSE, when it begins the install,
tell sme that it cannot resize or edit my current
partition table - no further information given.

Most frustrating! ANyone have any idea why this
is happening?

-puzzled

At a guess I would say it is to do with Dell using some sort of restriction on the computer hard drive.

Hi Chantrelle,
If it's a Dell machine BEWARE, Dell usually do not supply an XP installation disc, just a recovery disc, very naughty of them but it probably gets them more revenue from customers who haven't got a disc to do a clean install when things go wrong.
If putting linux on a Dell it is vital you take a back up of your existing partitions, using something like acronis drive image deluxe (free on the front of computer mags here in UK) and putting the images on to DVD. That way you will have a copy for backup when you discover any further pieces of system protection Dell have been kind enough to install, that will sadly leave your machine without an XP operating system.
Once backed up and verified that the backup has been written ok, then try shrinking your NTFS partition down to leave space for linux, with a windows partition tool like Partition magic, if that can't break the Dell embargo, and if you have faith in your backup you could wipe the hard drive, and recreate it a fresh with the Fat, Fat32 and a smaller NTFS partition.
Windows XP activation is very touchy on where it is on the system. For example if you take it from partition 3 to the second partition it will ask to be re-activated.
If you do not have your product activation key, another Dell nicety you are stuck, unless you download BelarcAdvisor first run it and obtain your product key that way first.
So to summarise:
Download Belarc Adviser and run it to get your XP product key
Backup your exisiting partitions as images to DVD
Shrink the NTFS partition to make room for linux.
If Dell has somehow stopped that even using say Partition magic 8, then it may be a case of wiping the disk and repartitioning and reformatting, using say a bootable partitioning disc from partition magic, then re-instating the DEll XP system into the same numbered partitions as original but now with a smaller NTFS one, leaving room for linux.
Dell Not only are large enough to make even Motherboards that will not fit standard power supplies they also try to change most pieces of hardware to make the machine non-upgradeable unless of course you buy expensive Dell parts.
Their and other large manufacturers non supply of full installation discs make sure there repair service makes money.
Linux is your friend here, once you can get it installed you will be able to upgrade and maintain your own system.

Hope this helps but Dell don't make it easy to do anything much to their machines (out of the Box).

Mad Malc

I converted my laptop(Pressario 2500) from XP to dual boot (grub) and SuSE 9.1 pro. Except for a small problem with the video card (ATI Radeon 320gm) it was a painless install. The video card problem took 5 minutes to resolve. Even mounting the ntfs was not a problem. Internet connection was seamless. Sound/USB/DVD,CDRW/Printer/Scanner/Digital Camera/ all worked without a hassle.
The biggest pain was getting XP to accept the resizing of the partition Partition Magic 8 under XP would bomb with too many errors and abort. That was with all anti-virus et al UNISTALLED. Booting off the cd into Caldera DR-DOS solved this. With a clean install, this would not be a problem.

-Fred

Therefore I can install SuSE 9.2 dual boot with Windows XP Home, but with NO problems at all?

I have a new laptop, and have Windows XP - And would like to move over to Linux however do a dual boot and am not sure which distro.

Thanks.

9.1 Dual booted with XP with me fine.
I had no probles at all.

I'm absolutely loving Linux since I've migrated, I used to really like Linux, now I'm running it! All I have is one problem with flaming INet connections...

I tried to set up my acer laptop with dual boot SuSE 9.1 Pro and XP sp2. Absolute nightmare. The SuSE 9.1 installed no problem but I then could not boot to XP. Grub reports 2 windows systems, when trying to boot from windows 1, the XP loading screen appears then after a few seconds a blue screen with 'Stop c0000021 unknown hard error \SystemRoot\System32\ntdll.dll' is displayed and the machine re-boots. When trying to boot to windows 2 I get 'root (hd0,2) Filesystem type is fat, partition type 0x1e chainloader +1.

I did not check here for info, just tried to fixmbr and fixpart from the XP boot cd, that did not work so I removed SUSE and came and looked here. I wish I'd known about this problem before hand.

Followed the instructions on the SUSE website about updating the parted file: http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/0...booting91.html

when I ran the fixpart command the system reports that the drive is fine, but it still wont boot to XP. I've now lost two days of work and am now bloody desparate. I really don't want to lose the contents of the XP partition.

Any body have any other ideas? The hdd is 40 gb and was originally partitioned with fat and fat32.

PS - tried to change to LBA in the bios but the selection is not there.

Cheers.

Well,

As for my Dell machine -

I had some troubles with SuSE 9.1 at first - at first it would not recognize my darn partition table - but, I
rebooted, once then twice - and mysteriously it THEN recognized it - I've no idea what that was about.
I was then suspicious, but I went ahead. I ran the SuSE fix to parted before I tried anything. I then
repartitioned by XP hogging drive, and used the default of GRUB for the boot manager. I let SuSE
configure things automatically. And lo and behold - it booted both SuSE and XP (with SP2) with no troubles
after that!

Now, if only I could get SuSE to recognize my !(*#(&!#& ! 24-bit, Dell supplied Soundblaster card.....

-chantrelle