Opensuse help required?

mishy

I am still new to linux and I have just got a dvd with Opensuse, KDE, Gnome. I have finished installing Opensuse and it was working ok but I have just restarted the computer but only the grub> screen comes up. What should I do to be able to boot back to linux? My root folder is (Hd0,0).

I would also Like to know if I will be able to dual boot with windows 2003 server?

dynamik

mishy wrote:

I am still new to linux and I have just got a dvd with Opensuse, KDE, Gnome. I have finished installing Opensuse and it was working ok but I have just restarted the computer but only the grub> screen comes up. What should I do to be able to boot back to linux? My root folder is (Hd0,0).

I'd guess that your grub config is misconfigured or corrupt. If you're new and don't have anything important on there, it'd probably be easiest for you to just reinstall. Otherwise, I believe you can get into a recovery/repair mode off the CD. I'm not sure if you can boot to the live CD and edit a local file system. That seems like it would be a valid option, but I've never tried it. Either way, you'll have to edit grub.conf manually. That might be a bit beyond your level at this point. It'd also be a great chance to dive in and learn something too!

mishy wrote:

I would also Like to know if I will be able to dual boot with windows 2003 server?

Yea, install Linux second, and it should take care of everything for you.

mishy

Thanks for the help and quick response. This was the first time installing linux and I am already thinking of sticking to windows because I could have used Last Known Good Configuration or something else along those lines.

The only thing I did was update the software and I know I had a few failures during the update but I will give it another go.

I s there any form of backup I can do for the future so as to avoid re-installs and having to wait with hours of updates after I have re-installed the software and updated it?

Also if I wanted to try recover what I have already installed is there a somewhere to get the info because this can be a learning point?

undomiel

Well for this one you'll need a live cd to get things fixed up as dynamik has suggested. You'd need to mount the /boot partition (or just / partition depending upon how you partitioned things at start-up) so that you can edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. It probably wasn't updated to point to the correct kernel. So once you're in the menu.lst file you'll want to make sure that kernel /boot/vmlinux... and initrd /boot/initrd... are pointing to the correct file names. You may also want to check that root (hdX,Y) is pointing to the correct place for your boot partition. The numbering scheme starts at 0 so the first hd pointing to the first partition would be root (hd0,0). The logical partitions start at 4 so the first logical partition would be root (hd0,4). Fixing that will be a lot faster than a reinstall. If you do just want to do a reinstall though you can use the live cd to mount any of the partitions on the hdd to copy data off. I've had to use the live cd to mount and rearrange things in my /home partition so as to keep my personal data. I never bothered with backing up the programs themselves though.