Re: preserving windows dual boot installing openSuse 11 from downloaded DVD

odindba wrote:

Ok Guys, thanks for all the help so far.

I installed openSuse 11 just now, from the downloaded DVD. I put Grub/
boot in the root partition (not the linux boot partition), but told
the installer not to touch my MBR. I'm in openSuse as I write here. I
am concerned that if I simply reboot my PC, I'll see the XP boot
manager, and not be able to get back here to openSuse. How would I do
this???? I recall that years ago, Redhat 8 created a boot diskette.

I believe the SUSE, (houghi note!), DVD has a way to boot an installed system. Since this is not a Windows question, someone might help! :-)

If you did a normal installation the root partition, ("/"), contains /boot/grub, and there is no "linux boot partition". It seems like you did the right thing!

Read this, as previously noted by J G Miller:

http://www.swerdna.net.au/linhowtoboot1.html

It shows how to copy the GRUB stage1 from the root partition to the Windows partition which is mounted in Linux. Of course you could also copy it first to a floppy, then boot to Windows and copy it to Windows from there.

I'd like some emergency Suse boot method (diskette or whatever), but
also, how would the dd command look to get the Grub stage 1 to a
diskette, or to my XP drive (C:) as a file that boot.ini could point
to? Will I do this from a terminal or from some Gnome entry????

See above. SUSE can do it!

You do it from a terminal in Linux. You need to be root.

If your Linux root partition is /dev/sda3 and you've mounted the Windows' C: partition as /mnt/windows, it looks like this:

dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/mnt/windows/suse.bin bs=512 count=1

This will copy a file to C: named "suse.bin". If you want to copy to floppy, of=mnt/fd0/suse.bin, if your floppy drive is mnt/fd0.

--
Virg Wall
.

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