Beware of SuSE linux Personal 9.1

Introduction to this web page

This web page is about the installation process of SuSE linux Personal 9.1 - and a characteristic that can catch you out if the pc is already multi-booting before the installation of SuSE linux.

The problem

SuSE linux Personal 9.1 is designed as a replacement for the normal Microsoft Windows operating system, and as such it is quite impressive - it is quite surprising how much they have packed into a totally free single cd iso-image.

However, there is a downside to this - during a default install, the installation manager - called YAST - looks for existing Windows installations, notes their existence, understands their hard drive partition structure, and then puts on the SuSE linux primary boot loader instead of using the Windows primary boot loader.

The Windows partitions are correctly added to the SuSE primary boot loader, and so Windows can be selected as the operating system during the boot-up process.

However by default, YAST doesn`t recognise other kinds of existing primary boot loader, and it just wipes them, without any warning.

So if the pc already has some non-Microsoft Windows operating systems, and a non-Windows primary boot loader is in use, then all that is lost, and the non-Windows operating systems cannot be booted.

Possible solutions

There are possible ways round this - first a bit of an expansion in what is written above.

When YAST lays down the SuSE linux primary boot loader, which incidentally is based on Grub, the entry for the Windows operating system doesn`t actually boot Windows directly.

YAST actually builds a pointer to the Windows boot loader located on the Windows partition, so the Windows boot loader becomes a secondary boot loader.

Windows can be booted from this secondary boot loader.

It is this secondary, Windows based, boot loader that gives us a way round the YAST characteristic of wiping third party boot loaders.

If before the installation of SuSE linux, multi-booting is set up using the Windows boot loader as the primary boot loader, then entries in this boot loader are preserved within the boot.ini file when YAST sets up the Windows boot loader as the secondary boot loader, and these other operating systems can be booted through this secondary Windows based boot loader.

( NB - we are talking about Windows NT / 2000 / XP here, 95 / 98 are DOS based, and have completely different ways of booting. )

If you are already using a third party primary boot loader, it probably would not be trivial to convert to a Microsoft Windows boot loader as the primary boot loader. However during the installation process, if you are wise to it, you can elect to retain your existing primary boot loader via the "Change" menu, and have a secondary boot loader for SuSE Linux. It isn`t however very obvious as a mechanism.

Finally

This web page came into being after a few installations of SuSE Linux Personal 9.1, and as a result of my losing the ability to boot Red Hat Linux 9 on my firewall development pc. This was a dual booting pc, ( XP + Red Hat ), and was using Grub as the primary boot loader. The installation of SuSE Linux wiped the existing Grub primary boot loader, along with access to all my recompiled kernels, and my ability to run Red Hat Linux 9 as a firewall.

YAST ignored the Red Hat swap partition, but did recognise that there were two Ext3 linux partitions, it mounted them as data volumes inside SuSE linux. However it didn`t recognise them as an operating system.

I failed to get Red Hat Linux 9 to boot by using a bootsect.lnx file and the XP secondary boot loader, mainly because I couldn`t create a working bootsect.lnx file - probably because the /boot partition doesn`t contain the boot-up information, it was all contained in Grub, which had been configured as the primary boot loader.

Eventually I was able to modify the file /boot/grub/menu.lst in SuSE Linux, and get Red Hat Linux 9 to boot from the SuSE Linux primary boot loader, with a different entry for each kernel.

This isn`t particularily straightforward, you need to have a good understanding of partition identification in Linux, and partition identification in Grub, as well as kernel and image file naming, and where to find them within Linux.

But here are the entries that were added - they are of course unique to this pc, and are unlikely to be of any use on other pc`s :-

      title Red Hat Linux 9 - kernel 2.4.20-8
         kernel (hd0,5)/vmlinuz-2.4.20-8 root=/dev/hda7
         initrd (hd0,5)/initrd-2.4.20-8.img

      title Red Hat Linux 9 - kernel 2.4.20-fw
         kernel (hd0,5)/vmlinuz-2.4.20-fw root=/dev/hda7
         initrd (hd0,5)/initrd-2.4.20-fw.img

But maybe they give an idea of what might work in other cases.

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