Dual Booting

[kfranc9]

I have never been able to successfully dual boot windows and linux. I can install both OS's fine, but GRUB can never seem to load Windows once linux is installed.

I have tried mainly two different ways:
1) Install Windows (leave unpartitioned space for linux)
2) Install Linux in unpartitioned space
3) and GRUB in the MBR

AND

1) Install Windows
2) Use partition magic to move the windows partition over so there is 75 MB of space for GRUB at the beginning of the hard disk
3) Install Linux after Windows Patition
4) Install GRUB in PBR (first boot sector) of /boot partition (located at the beginning of HDD)

One suggestion by SUSE is to enable LBA in the BIOS. http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/...ows_not_booting91.html]The help file is here[/URL]

My current motherboard is the MSI K8N Neo Platinum with an AMD64 3400+ chipset. I do not see any options about enabling LBA in my BIOS. Does anyone have any other suggestions. I've noticed Partitionmagic has given me partition table errors and qtparted gave me a message about disk geometries. Any help would be appreciated

 

[mee987]

could we see your grub.conf and the output of "fdisk -l /dev/hda" (or sda, or hdb, or whatever drive(s) linux and windows are on) ?

 

[Navid]

Once I wanted to give Linux a try. This is how I did it.
I had XP as my main OS. I installed Linux on the second primary partition. But, I did not let it take over the boot order. Every time I rebooted, I would go to my XP.
If I wanted to boot linux, I would have to put a Linux startup floppy in and reboot.
This was Mandrake I think about a year ago.

 

[arbytech]

Yes I did the same as Navid about two or three years ago using XP already installed and then installing Red Hat in unformatted space on the same drive. Using a boot floppy made choosing Linux pretty easy and it avoided any questions from my wife about "What's this?!". I believe that Red Hat gave an option for the boot floppy creation in it's setup.

 

[kfranc9]

Yea, I've actually done the boot floppy before, but it is quite annoying.

A co-worker of mine actually figured out the problem:
If searching "windows" on suse.portal.com, it is the first result in the list.

Basically it states that the particular version of Suse's partitioning tool is screwing up the partition table (or something of the sort). Although this wasn't one of the suggested work arounds...we used fdisk from a Knoppix CD to manually create the partitions.

After that, we did a normal Suse install and had Suse's partitioning tool only format the drive with the necessary file system. All worked well. Also, Windows XP was installed first.