After a pretty successful install of
SuSe 9 on the LapTop I decided to Dual Boot SuSe and XP on my desktop machine.
Awhile back when I installed a second hard drive GDISK was telling that I had Overlapping MBRs on my primary Disk. Some said that this can occur because of a virus. I did a few virus scans and I came out clean, not a drip. I think this Overlapping MBR problem came out because my Dual Booting of Win2k and Red Hat. When I installed Red Hat I told it to install a bootloader called GRUB in my MBR. This gave me the option to boot Linux or Windows. When I moved to XP it overrid my Bootloader. So i believe this is where my MBR got jacked.
When I booted my SuSe install disk it told me that there was problems with my primary disk and that i couldnt do anything to the partitions or create new partitions. This must be do to my MBR problem. So I decided that I wanted to completely wipe my primary disk, repartition and start over. But before hand I made a Ghost Image of my XP install. Since I already had Ghost installed from my previous Ghosting
endeavor this was not a problem, or so I thought. When starting the Ghost it asked me if i wanted to create boot disk so I can restore the image. I said no because I have Ghost on a few bootable CD Roms that will let me restore the image, or so i thought. Once the image was complete I wiped the disk with GDISK and then recreated my partions with
GDISK. I must add that creating partitions with GDISK is a snap. Its a 20 Gig HD I parted it like so.
1 10 gig Primary
1 3 gig Extended
1 3 gig Logical
(give or take, partition sizes never come out exact)
The rest remained free, until Linux is installed of course.
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Now all i had to do was boot my Ghost CD and restore. I ran into a snag here. It turns out that the Ghost I had on the boot cd was older then the Ghost I used to make the Image, so I couldnt restore. Crap! Here I had a perfectly good image but couldnt do anything with it. I needed a Windows machine to create me the boot cd I needed. Or i needed to install Ghost to restore my Image, but in order to do this i need to install windows, so i did. Took about 45 minutes. Once I installed Windows, I installed Ghost 2003 and told it to restore the Image I made a little more then an hour before. It gave me warnings about wiping a Windows Partition but it restored like a charm.
Now I booted my SuSe disk and I used the free space for it, about 8 or 9 gigs. When I installed SuSe on the LapTop it asked for 2 CDs but here it only took 1. Its pretty bare bones, but all the other software resides on the other 4 disks. I should have made the LapTop install as bare as this. This is install is not to bloated though. When i installed Red Hat so much crap got installed that I spent more time uninstalling. I didnt intend for this post to be this long, and its not what i wanted to talk about. There will be time for that.
