Thinkpads Forum

I had a multiboot with GRUB for XP Suse and Rescue&Recovery3.
I have had the very bad idea to upgrade to R&R4.
Result: could not boot the system. I used the XP install CD to manually fix the Master Boot Record with the fixmbr command.

Now I boot, but only into the R&R 4 system rescue.

I don't care for the Linux installation, but I would like to be able to boot into XP also.

Do you know how to do this? Is there another solution than another clean install from scratch?

I don't know what RR4 did to your machine, but you could try reinstalling Grub using the OpenSUSE install CD.

I tried but I get an error message:


Error 21: selected disk does not exist.

As if it did not recognize the harddrive....

I'm guessing that your partition table got messed up. Here is a link to a good thread that takes you through several things you can try with a knoppix CD.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... st-283042/

It's difficult for me to determine your level of expertise with Linux, so these are things you may or may not be comfortable with. Other than that, the only advice I can offer is to reinitialize the HD with rescue and recovery CD's, and return it to a factory state.

Thinkboy wrote:snip......Error 21: selected disk does not exist. As if it did not recognize the harddrive....

Could be of no help but please do make sure you've switched HDD settings from SATA to Compatibility mode in the BIOS.

I tried in Compatibility mode but it does not help

fdisk tells me my partition table is messed up.

The simplest (and fastest) thing is to reinitialize the drive.

Thanks for your help.

If it is just the partition table messed up try "testdisk". It is a CLI program but just follow the prompts and be sure to write at the end and it will fix your partition table.

Happy end!

I upgraded to OpenSuse 10.3 and it fixed the MBR with a new grub!