Bug 692047

If you happen to be able to run your installed openSUSE, save the yast logs with "save_y2logs" - its often the fisrt step to do.
then look if there is something you can use there:

http://dodin.org/wiki/index.php?n=Doc.TestingOpenSUSEearly#toc2

and here:

http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/install-boot-login/459210-booting-grub-how-debug.html

y2logs - see attachment 428178 [details]. 

Grub is working fine. I can boot openSUSE etc. The problem is really just that Windows doesn't boot when selected from grub. 
Is there anything special I have to do to make that work?  I've got two other machines openSUSE+WinXP, these work fine but they're using lilo.

ok

did you follow the instruction on the page I gave? specially using updategrub?

No, like I've been saying, there is no grub problem here. 

However, I have progress to report. The Windows Repair Disc reports that it has found a problem with the "my computers startup options". I said "please repair" after which the machine rebooted, again from the repair disc. Once up, I asked it to go repair/recover the Windows 7 installation, where is reported "Root cause
found: boot manager is missing or corrupt". 
After this repair, I booted the rescue system, marked my openSUSE root
partition as bootable, and rebooted - et voila! everything works. 

The questions remains - how did the installation of openSUSE screw up the
windows boot manager?  Is the boot manager perhaps installed at the end of a
partition, which would cause the resizing to screw it up?

Judging by the contents of the Windows C-drive (partition 2), the repair process actually created/installed a file called "bootmgr" in c:\ - I know it wasn't there before, but I don't know if it was there before I resized the partition.

I had ecactly the same experience when installing 11.4 on a Toshiba R700.
Linux bootet just fine, but attempting to boot windows gave me "BOOTMGR is missing".

The reason for this is the notebooks nonstandard partition layout, where there is a small sda1 windows boot partition which is distinct from the windows OS partition sda2 and that yast2 grub configurator does not correctly detect this and creates a windows boot entry pointing directly to sda2.

    Gerät  boot.     Anfang        Ende     Blöcke   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048      821247      409600   27  Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sda2          821248   139526457    69352605    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3   *   139528192   625141759   242806784    f  W95 Erw. (LBA)
/dev/sda5       139530240   606502911   233486336   83  Linux
/dev/sda6       606504960   608606207     1050624   83  Linux
/dev/sda7       608608256   625104895     8248320   82  Linux Swap / Solaris

While in fact this "makes any newbie run away screaming" the fix was just adjusting the partition of the "rootnoverify" entry of the grub windows boot entry in /etc/boot/grub/menu.lst.

Trivial for anyone skilled with grub.

exactly what is described in the document I quoted, and solved easily with updategrub (or manually)

(In reply to comment #6)
> I had ecactly the same experience when installing 11.4 on a Toshiba R700.
> Linux bootet just fine, but attempting to boot windows gave me "BOOTMGR is
> missing".
> 
> The reason for this is the notebooks nonstandard partition layout, where there
> is a small sda1 windows boot partition which is distinct from the windows OS
> partition sda2 and that yast2 grub configurator does not correctly detect this
> and creates a windows boot entry pointing directly to sda2.

So the WinRE partition is a boot manager partition where Windows really should be booted from?  Interesting, thanks.  I guess this is new with the latest Windows variations? 

> While in fact this "makes any newbie run away screaming" the fix was just
> adjusting the partition of the "rootnoverify" entry of the grub windows boot
> entry in /etc/boot/grub/menu.lst.
> Trivial for anyone skilled with grub.

Certainly trivial, but it doesn't seem that many people actually know this. YaST needs to be fixed, certainly.

(In reply to comment #7)
> exactly what is described in the document I quoted, and solved easily with
> updategrub (or manually)

jdd, I don't want to appear ungrateful, but none of the documents you referred to even mention that Windows now has a boot manager partition, nor the winRE partition.

I'm sorry the text is a bit long, but the second link above, go to "third case" and it's the windows case.
also updategrub fixes the problem

I'm aware of the issue, but I'm really lacking time atm.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 686530 ***