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Like it had been recommended to me, I have now bought an extra HD (USB connected), installed Linux (OpenSUSE 10.1 x86-64) on it. Now when I reboot and tell the boot loader I want to run windows, it calls some chaining program ... and that's it.

Fortunately I can simply unplug the USB drive and then normally boot from my internal HD, but that's not quite what I wanted.

As I am on it, aclocal cannot be found either in my Linux installation when I am trying to make d2x-xl.

Clues anybody?

I believe I heard someone mention that the boot loader has to be installed on the same drive as the windows boot or it wouldn't function properly.

I assume you are using grub. It is probably pointing to the wrong windows partition in the grub.conf. The chainloader is trying to forward control onto the windows boot loader but is not finding it. Boot linux and check the grub config and make sure the drive and partition that has windows on it is correct. If windows is your first drive then it is probably (hd0,0). Also, if you are booting off the second drive then grub probably has the drive orders wrong. Best is to install grub on the windows drive's MBR if that's the case.

Good luck

In your grub.conf, make sure the \"rootnoverify\" line just before \"chainloader +1\" is pointing at the correct partition. If Linux can see your Windows drive, use that information to correct the rootnoverify line. /dev/hda0 would be (hd0,0). /dev/hdb0 would be (hd1,0), and so on.

rebooting off the USB drive changes the order of how GRUB enumnerates drives - the USB drive becomes hd0(the booted drive always becomes hd0)

you need to do some drive remapping in order for that to work in grub.

basically, for you its

map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
boot

Are you using ubuntu? you might have to dl the autoconf tarball and compile it, cause I never could get ubuntu to properly install autoconf correctly.

Thanks for the advice. Where do I find grub.conf? I am a complete Linux noob.

Edit: aclocal problem solved.

Diedel wrote:Thanks for the advice. Where do I find grub.conf? I am a complete Linux noob.

Edit: aclocal problem solved.

/boot/grub/grub.conf or menu.lst

make sure your boot partition is mounted, if you have one.

I didn't find it in /boot/grub.

Ok, found it in menu.lst. Here the stuff from that file:

title Windows
chainloader (hd1,0)+1

Now this looks like it tries to boot Windows off hd1. Now is the problem that during rebooting hd1 becomes hd0, or what? I had found that Windows wouldn't boot when I had the USB HD connected when it still was a Windows HD. It looks like I cannot even select my internal HD as boot drive in the BIOS anymore with the USB HD connected. The internal HD is a SATA HD.

Now I am wondering what will happen if I change menu.lst as proposed: Can it happen that I cannot boot Linux any more after doing that? Is there anything else I have to edit, like e.g. this section:

title SUSE Linux 10.1
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb2 vga=0x317 resume=/dev/sdb1 splash=silent showopts
initrd /boot/initrd

?

whatever drive you boot off of, grub will peg that as hd0.

NTLDR will throw fits if its told its not on anywhere on HD0, so the map commands will tell grub to tell NTLDR what it wants to hear.

tho, try this first: chainloader only accepts an argument of +1 as far as I know, and the (hd1,0)+1 stuff has me scratching my head.

the nice thing about grub is you can edit the entries from the grub menu directly. so you don't have to mess around with booting too much, and once your happy with it, add it to your menu.lst or grub.conf

That change did not help. It looks like the problem is how my system reacts to the presence of the USB HD (not seeing the SATA HD as booteable HD anmore in the BIOS). Weird. As I said, before I installed Linux, the USB drive had a FAT32 partition, and when I plugged it in, I couldn't boot Windows anymore (and the BIOS wouldn't offer the SATA drive as boot drive).