Thinkpads Forum

I have dual-booted my T43 for the past year or so with OpenSUSE Linux 10 (recently upgraded to 10.1) and Windows XP with great success and minimal issues...UNTIL yesterday!!!

Having been on vacation and not used the device much over the past few weeks I dutifully checked for available updates. I utilized the IBM Access Advantage Software Update application to upgrade the software. All appeared to go well with the install of 5 or 6 apps needing refreshing which included a BIOS upgrade. I defragmented the hard drive (without issues) :( when suggested by the script and let the install resume with no error messages and the system rebooted.

Then the dread "GRUB" statement in caps at the command line and nothing else happened...it just hung there. Googling provided no other recent incidents that were similarly comparable.

Using the suggested OpenSUSE recovery procedures gleaned from the SUSE manual results in the failure of the program to find the hard drive in order to rewrite the Grub boot manager.

I can however boot the machine into SUSE using the first installation cd. Attempting to rewrite the boot manager and include Windows XP from within the Yast program seems to process but results in the same issue...upon rebooting the Thinkpad it still will not get further than the "GRUB" statement. No error message or number is received other than that one word.

The upgrade has obviously altered the geometry of the Windows partition or otherwise damaged the boot sector. What I would like to know is what would be the safest method to recover the boot partition without having to reload either OS.

I would appreciate any suggestions any of you might have.

Thanks,

Ernie

Troubleshooting starts with analysis of error messages. GUI tools usually suppress these messages. If I had such a problem I'd run grub-install in chrooted environment, hopefully it will tell why install does not succeed. If you do not like this idea try another boot loader, GAG does usually excellent job. In this case you need to install GRUB on partition instead of MBR.

Is the partition containing the /boot/grub files hidden? If one of your updates hid the Suse partition, then GRUB won't see its files and can't continue the boot process beyond the first stage.

Try Partition Magic, or try booting from a Live Linux CD like Knoppix and view the partition table with Qtparted or the like. Look to see if your Suse partitions are still listed and whether or not they're hidden.

Or, the GRUB manual contains a list of commands that you can enter at the GRUB> prompt to see what's happening.
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html
Try the first half of Section 3.2 to see if the /boot/grub files are still there.

Thanks for your suggestions. I finally found some instructions that seemed reasonable on the OpenSUSE forum. The MBR has been rewritten through a OpenSUSE session booting from disk 1 of the installation media and re-writing the Boot Manager from within a YAST session.

It is booting Windows and OpenSUSE now. These latest updates from IBM/Lenovo did not gone well for me compared to several earlier ones. I'll have to think long and hard the next time updates are presented.

Thanks again,

Ernie