Suse 9.1 Installation Problem

[DanJ]

I'm trying to get Suse 9.1 installed in a dual-boot configuration on one of my home computers. I installed it without a hitch on an older 500MHz Dell at work that we are using for a server. Nice install without issue.

The odd part about the install I attempted on my home computer is that it goes through the initial setup where the vast majority of files are loaded off CD1 and then reboots per usual; except it doesn't come back to YaST; rather it goes to a GRUB command line and nothing else. No boot options, no setup screen; typing help gives a short list of avaliable commands. To get the PC going again I have to rebuild the mbr with fdisk.

My system is setup as follows:

C: Drive (60 gigs - NTFS - WinXP)
D: Drive (10 gigs - unformatted)
K: Drive (80 gig RAID-0 array - NTFS)

Specs: 900MHz Celeron, 768MB RAM, Abit BX6 2.0 (latest BIOS), Radeon AIW, SBLive!

My thought was to use the D drive completely for Linux (I'll probably end up creating a FAT32 partition later once I get this installed to share data). In YaST I specified it to use the entire D drive and it configured it as 1GB swap (probably overkill) and 9GB for the rest (reiser). Formatted fine. Bootloader was GRUB of course.

So I installed with typical options and KDE. I tried Gnome as well just for kicks but the same result.

It seems to setup fine off CD1 then on reboot just kicks to a grub command line and thats all I get.

Any ideas?

 

[n0cmonkey]

What happens when you type the appropriate commands into grub?

 

[DanJ]

Not sure what you mean by appropriate commands. There really doesn't seem to be any useful ones and what is there is quite cryptic.

I've also since tried a net install with the same result (though that was expected I guess...)

Trying Mandrake now...though I'd prefer SuSE.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I haven't ever used GRUB. If there is an option to use LILO, you could try that...

 

[TonyRic]

When you say that it kicks to the grub command line are you saying it goes to the black screen with "grub>"?

 

[DanJ]

Correct...

I installed Mandrake no problem but prefer SuSE so I'd like to figure this out...so strange.

 

[drag]

Well with grub you have some commands you can try out.

Plus it has autocompletion....

Try just giving it
root (<tab><tab>
kernel /<tab><tab>
initrd /<tab><tab>

or
kernel /boot/v

then hit "tab" a bunch of times and see what grub can find for you.

The correct answer should go something like this:
root (hd#.#)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.#.#.blahblah root=/dev/hd##
initrd /boot/initrd-img.2.#.#.blahblahblah
boot

Were the ## stuff matches you entries.

In grub root= the partition your boot partition is on. That's the root for grub, not your OS. However unless you have a seperate boot partition, the root for grub and the root for your OS should be the same.

In grub the entries for the boot partition go by numbers. (hd0) is the first disk, (hd0,0) is the first parition on the first disk. Shouldn't be to hard to figure out.

The grub boot loader is like a miniture retarded OS, just for loading the kernel.

In linux the harddrive go /dev/hda is the primary master, /dev/hdb is the primary slave, /dev/hdc is the secondary master, /dev/hdd is the secondary slave.

And the parition number is just added on to the harddrive name when referencing a specific partition. So /dev/hdc2 would be the second partition on the secondary master IDE device.

So on and so forth.

 

[Zelmo3]

Someone correct me if I'm way off base here, but I seem to remember having trouble putting a Linux bootloader on an NTFS partition. That's why on two desktop installs I made a small boot partition with FAT32, then separate partitions for NTFS and Linux.
Then again, SuSE had no troubles installing on my laptop with just one NTFS and one Linux partition, so separating a boot partition may be a waste of effort and space.

 

[txxxx]

GRUB with SuSE has issues starting from an extended partition. To solve, just place your first CD / DVD in , start installation, and it'll detect the presence of SuSE. Choose to boot.

Once all setup , using the control center, install LILO as default. You can also do it from terminal too, 'lilo'

 

[manly]

Originally posted by: Zelmo3
Someone correct me if I'm way off base here, but I seem to remember having trouble putting a Linux bootloader on an NTFS partition. That's why on two desktop installs I made a small boot partition with FAT32, then separate partitions for NTFS and Linux.
Then again, SuSE had no troubles installing on my laptop with just one NTFS and one Linux partition, so separating a boot partition may be a waste of effort and space.

The MBR isn't written onto a filesystem (partition).

 

[erichbf]

I had the same problem, and was able to fix it by selecting LILO as the boot loader, which you can do before the stuff all loads from CD1. I am certain there is a way to fix by using the grub shell, but I don't have the time to learn about all that stuff. It is just a boat loader, once the OS is loaded, who cares?