Bug 640475

Summary:	great difficulty fixing SUSE booting as there was no fix in installer to do it.
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 11.3	Reporter:	Charlie Barfield <nothereforever>
Component:	Documentation	Assignee:	Frank Sundermeyer <fs>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	Karl Eichwalder <ke>
Severity:	Major
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	jsrain
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	i586
OS:	openSUSE 11.3
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Charlie Barfield 2010-09-20 09:45:50 UTC

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 SUSE/3.6.10-0.3.1 Firefox/3.6.10

i mistakenly put boot loader in the MBR. then windows came along and ereased it. but i didnt want to reinstall SUSE, and i didnt know much about the command line stuff and tools. so i wanted to use the setup disk to fix it. there was help on the net that said the setup had the ability to fix it but SUSE 11.3 didnt have it, it must have been removed ! (thus the "major" severity selected)

details here, forum post 5:
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-help-here/install-boot-login/446087-my-experiences-installing-suse.html

so i had to do a long battle with the setup program till it gave me what i wanted, the setup of the bootloader.

but i think you can fix this and make customising the already installed installation as easy as installing a new one. so i ask that you present the same options to the user with the SUSE on HDD already and to the user who wants to install. this could make stuff a whole lot easier.


Charlie.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.install with boot loader on MBR
2.have windows add a partition to the disk
3.reboot to find no more MBR boot loader
4: fight the installer to put it back on, but this time on the root drive.

Comment 1 Jiri Srain 2010-10-05 13:46:51 UTC

You still can boot installation CD and then switch to the system you have installed and with 'yast2 bootloader' reinstall bootloader to where it fits.

Stephan, can you take care of adjusting the documentation?

Charlie, could you, please, post a direct link to the information about repair you mention at the forum?

Comment 2 Charlie Barfield 2010-10-07 06:38:07 UTC

i think this is the direct link:
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-help-here/install-boot-login/446087-my-experiences-installing-suse.html#post2220721
the post numbers ie: #1,#2 etc are seen at the top right of every post, in line with the date/time.


the only other method i tried was i chose "rescue system" option on the boot but it appeared to crash (unresponsive) on "loading basic drivers..." on which i couldnt be botherd writing a bug report on that....

i was unaware of that method but I dont quite know how to do that from the DVD boot screen, i thought if i chose "boot from hard disk" i assumed it would boot to windows as that was the only one that worked at the time.

Charlie.

Comment 3 Charlie Barfield 2010-10-07 06:54:05 UTC

dont worry about the rescue system problem it was just slow.

(pointless reading:)
i have a funny arrangement here, the linux HDD is on a USB controller which doesnt work if the computer is turned on with it plugged in, and begins to work about 1-2 minutes after it is unplugged/replugged.

i left it on the rescue thing while being unresponsive, unplugged/replugged the usb and went away while the USB controller "wakes up" and came back to it saying "rescue login:"

Comment 4 Stephan Kulow 2010-10-11 09:23:20 UTC

if it's a documentation bug, then this should be set correctly. I do not write the documentation - and everyone is glad that's so.

Comment 5 Karl Eichwalder 2010-10-18 08:08:08 UTC

Frank, can you handle this?

Comment 6 Frank Sundermeyer 2010-12-01 14:30:52 UTC

The documentation sources have been fixed. An online update for the Start-Up and the Reference Guide will be published soon.

For more information, see also:

Bug #656351
https://features.opensuse.org/310899

Comment 7 Karl Eichwalder 2010-12-27 12:31:58 UTC

Frank fixed it.