OpenSUSE Install :: How To Avoid Windows MBR From Overwriting And Corrupting Grub
Jul 18, 2011
I had opensuse/winxp running.
First windows xp wouldn't boot - then opensuse **** out and I had nothing but a black screen. I spent about two days trying to figure out what in god's name happened. I finally got a copy of winxp recovery disk and it couldn't find the partition that windows was on. That gave me some idea of what was going on. So I tried to fix the matter from partitionmagic. I reinstalled grub making sure that everything was associated properly. I still couldn't get either opensuse or windows to boot after many many different trial and error attempts.
After deciding there was no help for it. I decided to slave my hard drive and wipe to start over. So I booted partition magic from USB and deleted my opensuse partition and -what do you know - windows booted right up. Aside from feeling windows xp's smug grin as the logo appeared - i am perplexed as to how this happened. My guess is that MBR tried to overwrite grub. But I think that the loader was confused and trying to boot from the wrong partition.
I want to reinstall opensuse again. However I want to make sure that this doesn't happen. I need my xp partition for examsoft because wine doesn't seem to work for it and I can't vbox it. So is there some way to make sure that when I do install from DVD on my USB that:
1) repositories are correct
2) MBR doesn't overwrite grub (should I install Grub2 or LILO?)
I'm wondering how I would go about dual-booting Ubuntu with openSUSE installed first?
I'm just a little bit concerned about the versions of Grub overwriting the openSUSE version or theme or something.
Would it work okay if I just shrink my openSUSE partition and then set the Ubuntu installer to install Ubuntu to the free space only or do I need to edit the grub file and stuff?
I'm facing difficulty while writing to an already existing file . I'm making a shell (programming in C). I want a file (say , logfile) to keep a record of all the commands a user enters. For the first command it runs fine , but for the second time and thereafter it overwrites the previous contents. How do I avoid this?
Why does Windows (7) [over-]write the MBR [pseudo-randomly]? And what settings can I change to prevent that?
Background : I used to dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows-7 on my gaming-laptop, but periodically I run into GRUB-got-messed-up-please-fix-me-again welcome screens. how-to guides on restoring GRUB, but no obvious ones on how to avoid messing up GRUB in the first place. Whats interesting to note; I have another work-laptop that dual-boots Windows XP and Ubuntu just fine (for the past year) and have never run into any GRUB-got-messed-up-please-fix-me-again situations.
My Hypothesis : I have a hunch that Windows 7 writes to the MBR for enabling Restore-Points.
Maybe some experts have a deeper knowledge what's going on? Seems GNU GRUB version 0.97 is corrupting ntfs partition if installed on it on my 2.6.31.5-127.fc12.x86_64
[Code]...
How I have achieved this: Upgraded (in fact installed on the same partition without reformatting) W7 32 (RC-7100) to W7 64 enterprise. It has nuked grub (used to boot FC-12) and silently removed a small boot (or windows backup) partition so ntfs became sda3 instead of sda4. Booting from fedora dvd causes the sequence listed above.
The main problem here is that grub doesn't boot windows: there was "unknown filesystem" error. After fixing boot record with "testdisk" I get: "booting windows in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... booting windows in 3 ... 2.. forever" If I use W7 repair disk it fixes windows and nukes grub away (ntfs partition has to be active for that otherwise the smart soft can't find it). So, making sda1 active and placing grub there is not an option...
I have a used PC that came pre-installed with suse 11.2.Unfortunately, I do not have the install disk to use in case of whatever.I already know that when configuring a dual boot with Windows and Linux, it is recommended to install Windows first.I do not have that luxury now as 11.2 is installed and GRUB is the boot loader.Question is, if I boot the Windows 98 install disk on boot, how to not mess up GRUB and still add Windows 98 to GRUB menu?
One hard drive only here. 98gb free.It seems that W98 install will overwrite GRUB in this situation - causing problems. Maybe not, I don't really know for sure.I just need to install windows 98 on the same hard drive and if possible, have suse and w98 visible on boot in GRUB.
I installed Ubuntu 10.10 64 on a Compaq CQ60 laptop on a 60 gig partition with a 3 gig swap partition. I'm running windows 7 64bit ultimate on the main partition. I installed off a live disc and Ubuntu works and runs great(except for wifi >.<).
My problem is ever since I installed Ubuntu Windows wont load every time. About half the time I select Windows 7 in the boot loader and it pulls up the windows screen with the stupid little flag, and then resets itself.
There where no problems with Windows 7 prior to the install. I've read that if you didn't reset your computer after shrinking your drive in windows it will cause problems later. But I did that so I cant think of any other explanation for why it would continually crash. Has anybody else had this issue, is this something that might be repaired by removing Ubuntu and the partition and reinstalling it?
I hate this, when the Optical Drive is locked, if I not burning something on the disk! I just want to remove it, by pressing the eject button on the drive, but this is not working because Linux locks it I know, I could eject it via the Device Notifier, but I want to eject it at anytime by pressing the eject button on the drive.
Is there a method to prevent the grub installer from overwriting the MBR pointer when grub or the kernel is updated? I'm running a multiboot system and when Fedora's grub installs, then OpenSolaris' partition isn't included in the bootlist and Ubuntu's menu line has a chainloader line that doesn't resolve correctly, requiring a hand edit.I may try to do a chmod 444 grub-install , but I'm not so sure what the reprocussions may be.
I just installed OpenSuSE 11 and after it was done installing and i rebooted, Windows doesn't show up on the boot screen I only get the default OpenSuSE and Fail Safe options.
All i know is that vista is on sda3 when i partitioned my drive. Here is my menu.lst entry for windows:
###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows### title windows rootnoverify (hd0,8) chainloader (hd0,0)+1
i just installed openSUSE on my machine which had windows 7 in other partition as primary partition. Now after rebooting i see the green screen showing only 2 options
I've just installed windows on my computer for gaming, since it took over the boot loader I went into the repair system function of the opensuse DVD. Now I'm back in linux but no windows partition is showing up on the grub menu. This is the output of fdisk -l how do I make it so grub sees my windows too? This is probably an easy fix but I'm a prior ubuntu guy and just started playing with suse which seems a bit more tech savvy and less forgiving then ubuntu. code...
I need some help since i installed opensuse 11.2 when i boot my pc, grub doesnt show me windows to boot only opensuse and failsafe this is my details code...
I virus got my XP installation this morning. I have to install it. When I install windows it will write over the GRUB and I will no longer be able to re-boot my openSusie OS. My question is After XP is installed is there a way to re-install GRUB without having to re-install openSusie 11.2?
I was able to install opensuse 11.2 wihtout problems from LiveCD. After installation I noticed there is a cross in Network Connection. But in Live CD it's not there. I opended Network Manager and setp up my DSL Pppoe connecton and it's working. Hope this behaviour is normal ?I am little confused regarding software update. In Yast control centre:
1. Software repositories I will not have to touch default is ok ? 2. Just select Online Update and all the updates will be taken care 3. Is there any settings to avoid unnecessary software downloads
For a number of openSUSE releases now, on a periodic basis (monthly, it seems?) both my laptop and my desktop take forever to start. During this time, the hard disk activity is going berserk. When inspecting this with "iotop", a process called "preload" or "start_preload" is hammering the disk, sometimes up to 10 minutes.
The irony is when you research "preload", you find mostly articles like "drastically speed up your Linux system with preload"- I sometimes think it has to do with running VMs on these machines and maybe it's trying to cache those large disk images? Pure speculation, but I can't seem to find any documentation on this.
Anyway, I did finally find a way to turn this thing off. WARNING: since I do not know exactly what preload does and whether your machine becomes unusable if you turn it off, please only follow these instructions at your own risk. Since preload seems to be a very low-level system/service, I did not want to risk uninstalling it. What I did instead was:
Yast2 - System Services (RunLevel) Click the Expert Mode radio button Scroll down to the boot.startpreload entry
[code].....
Since I applied these steps, no long boot times with insane hard disk activity has occurred and I also have not noticed anything else complaining or not working with this service off.
After shutting down linux the first time on suse 11.2 the grub loader won't show me the option to boot windows. I tried using wine and dosemulator to get to windows and it doesn't work because I don't know the file name to open windows.
Their are certain programs that I can only run in windows and I need windows open to install them.
My problem is that I have installed openSUSE 11.2 on a laptop with Windows 7 already installed. Yast resized my Windows partitions, which seemed to upset Windows as I had to go to my Windows Recovery Disc to restore it. When Windows was restored it did something so that GRUB no longer appeared. So I did a system recovery for openSUSE 11.2 which then removed Windows 7 from GRUB! Now I'm trying to restore Windows 7 and configure GRUB so that Windows and openSUSE will stop fight for boot supremacy and play nice with each other. Here are my Yast2 Boot Loader settings:
Section Management Settings SUSE LINUX (type)image (/dev/sda6, root=dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST9320320AS_5SX4PRAS-part6) Failsafe SUSE LINUX (type)image (/dev/sda6, root=dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST9320320AS_5SX4PRAS-part6) Boot Loader Installation Settings Boot Loader: GRUB Boot Loader Location: Boot from Extended Partition Disk Order: /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST9320320AS_5SX4PRAS
I have been carrying out updates of both Vista & SuSE whenever i operate in them.
One (Not So) Fine Day, when i Choose from the Grub loader "Microsoft Windows Vista SP2" option it just din't boot into Vista. I have Tried many a time.
My First doubt was towards Vista only, so i choose the "Windows Recovery Mode" option from Grub. It went into the Recovery mode. I ran Memory Tests on Windows Partition, took its own sweet time, whatever missing indexes and all it carried out and finally gave the Thumbs Up result. After that, i carried out Startup Repairs, all came out well. So, Yet again i restarted and tried to get in Vista. Nope, dint work.
Recently, I downloaded openSUSE 11.2 DVD.I read here (Partitioning/Install Guide) that GRUB may not dual boot correctly with windows: It should be said that grub does not always get the settings to boot Windows quite correct and you may later have to adjust the /boot/grub/menu.lst file in your Linux installation
Is it true also for the openSuse version (11.2) that I downloaded? Please refer to Windows 7.
I have an ASUS A8N-SLI board with an nForce4 raid 1 setup hosting a Windows 7 array over two 500GB disks. I have a third SATA drive with opensuse 11.3 installed and working perfectly. By changing the boot order in the BIOS, I can alternate which system boots at startup. What I want to do is set up a dual boot configuration... I don't care how, but I want a screen that asks me which OS to use, preferably defaulting to Windows so my wife can stil check her email without calling me at work.
I thought the easiest setup would be to set the LINUX drive as the primary device and then add then chainload the Windows disks, and set them first in the boot queue. That way, without any intervention, the system would pause for 8 seconds and see if I wanted to boot LINUX, then boot Windows if I didn't do anything.
The problem is, I can't figure out how to add Windows to the GRUB menu and recognize it. All of the documentation I can find seems to assume that your Windows and LINUX partitions are on the same disk, which mine are not.
ok basically i have 2 hard disks one Seagate 500GB Sata, and one Western digital SATA my windows 7 is on the western digital and i think thats sda1, and opensuse is on the seagate the grub loader is on the western digital, and earlier today everything booted fine, till i went to boot windows
i had 2 "other" options, i selected the first one and it failed, the second other booted to windows, after about 3 hours on windows and doing nothing. i went to reboot and go to opensuse, and got a "grub loading stage 1.5., please wait" and it loads forever and nothing happens, it just idles im currently on the livecd just to get an operating system to use to get the net
I installed opensuse 11.2 today on my external hard drive and everything is running great, but I want to see if I can make a modification to the way my computer boots. I share this computer with others and they are not going to be happy to have to wait for the boot menu to start when they turn on the computer in order to choose which OS to run (Especially since if they do not make a choice it auto runs opensuse after a few seconds).
What I would like is if opensuse can be "out of sight, out of mind" and only load when I put in the live cd and then choose to boot from my external...... is it possible to do this?I am not a computer wizard and do not work in the industry.
This is a problem when Windows is running some malware that cannot be removed, which happens all the time. The problem is all the new hardware or specialized hardware will not work on Linux so Windows is the only choice. I would think the latest versions of Linux would have this problem worked out by now. I installed 11.3 one week ago, only to find that the repair option in the install menu no longer exists so don't bother uses this link to reload the GRUB HowTo Boot into openSUSE when it won't Boot from the Grub Code on the Hard Drive. I also tried this link Re-Install Grub Quickly with Parted Magic which does not work either. On step 2 typing grub returns the error message "grub command not found". You can use GRUB if you boot the install DVD and select Rescue Boot. However when you type find /boot/grub/menu.lst the error message "file not found" is returned.
I did the following to restore my GRUB boot record. Boot the install DVD and select the update option during installation. Change all the repositories to enable except the NVIDIA repository, it is not responding at this time. When the system comes up go into Yast and open the boot loader. It should have your original boot menu in memory. Change the default to another option and re-write the MBR. This will write a new MBR using the original data updated with your new default. Re-boot and then change your default back. I am just a NewBe so this may not be exactly correct but I hope it saves someone like me some time fixing a MBR re-writing by the Windows installer.
A few days ago my Laptop wouldn't hibernate in Windows 7, I managed to fix this problem by going into Windows' Disk Management tool and setting the C:/ Partition as the active partition, this fixed my hibernation issue, however I have just noticed that now when I boot my laptop my GRUB menu no longer appears, instead it just loads Windows straight away as if it was the only OS on my laptop.
I've confirmed it's something to do with my recent Disk Management change as I booted up GParted, removed the boot flag from Windows and when a rebooted my GRUB menu reappeared.
Not sure on how I can both have Windows as the active partition while being able to keep GRUB working also.
My Partition Setup is as follows:
/dev/sda1 C:/ Windows 7 (NTFS) (Boot Flag Set) /dev/sda2 D:/ DATA (Documents and stuff) (NTFS) Unallocated 1 MB /dev/sda3 Extended 146.49 GB (LBA Flag Set) /dev/sda5 Linux Swap 2.01 GB /dev/sda6 ext4 20.00 GB /dev/sda7 ext4 124.46 GB Unallocated 10.00 MB
I can't turn on my PC and write jet from my neighbors notebook. Because of problems with Windows updates und ubuntu vpn I installed today Windows 7 again and then openSuse. It was OK. Than I began with set up of different Programms for windows, like WinRar, Avira Antivir ect... As soos as it was done I wanted to begin with set up of openSuse... But the start menu is gone - there is nothing there now! Last time I could choose betwee 2 windows partitions, openSuse start-partition and openSuse fall-Save. -Now there is only "grub>" line
And I doesn't have any idea what I can do, I doesnt know where are startfiles, where is /boot/grub order, I don't know how can grub be used also. But I know that if I try to register my windows 7 agan at the same day, my windows lizens would get invalid. Has someone any idee what can be done?
I've had an annoying couple of days beginning with a win7 reinstall on a dual boot system (win7/10.10) that wiped out grub. I reinstalled ubuntu (10.04) in the hopes of just getting grub2 back up, but that failed and I ended up with a new install of 10.04 on the partition and a happily functioning and coexisting win7/ubuntu wit grub working the way that I wanted.
However, I'm traveling, and tried to reinstall the wifi drivers manually. I think I messed something up and installed the 10.10 drivers onto the 10.04 system (I only had a 10.04 disk and the pendrive usb method failed). Anyway, when I tried to (re)install the drivers from the cd, I got the error: a later driver has already been installed. However, the problem at hand is as follows: now my win7 install doesn't see any of the wireless networks around.So, I think I somehow fraked the wifi card.
A few days ago I went to perform the Service Pack 1 Upgrade for Win 7. This crashed out with an error. On researching the problem I found a solution to fix the problem by marking the Windows partition as active. I did this (via Computer Mgmt -> Disk Mgmt). This allowed the SP1 upgrade to work, however on reboot I got an error BOOTMGR missing. This I rather rashly resolved by using the Windows 7 install DVD in Recovery mode to reinstall the Windows Boot manager via bootrec /Fixboot I thought I would then be able to use the Opensuse 11.2 install disk to fix grub.
I use the Opensuse install disk and select Repair system -> Expert Mode -> Install New Boot Loader then select Other -> Reread Configuration from Disk. This adds Win 7 back into the grub menu. I then select OK and get the message "the bootloader was installed successfully". The problem then comes when I click my way through OK and Next to finish the install. At the end of the process I get the message "An error occurred during the installation" and I'm no further forward.
FYI the PC has a single SATA disk installed partitioned as follows:
dev/sda1 100Mb Win System Parkition dev/sda2 Windows NTFS dev/sda3 Windows FAT
