Recovering SUSE 9.1 Boot Loader

[Vishal Gupta]

Guys!
There r 3 OS installed in my sys: Win 98, Win XP and SUSE 9.1
If something goes wrong and I reinstall 98 or XP, the Boot Loader of SUSE linux is overwritten and lost.
I want to know how to recover it?
The Red Hat Linux trick to recover its boot loader doesnt work!
Pls tell me the solution.

[ujjwal]

Boot into any live cd which supports your hardware and the filesystem used by Suse (preferably, use a rescue disk if you can).

Mount your linux partitions under a certain directory, say /mnt/linux (Note that if you have a different partition for /boot, you will need to mount it under /mnt/linux/boot). Now chroot to /mnt/linux (chroot /mnt/linux) and run grub-install /dev/hda to install GRUB to your MBR.

If you used a suse rescue disk, it would probably mount your linux partitions automatically at a certain locations, probably somewhere and /mnt. All you would need to do is the chroot'ing and the grub-install bit

If some partition layout had changed after GRUB was wiped out, you will need to make the necessary adjustments to the file /boot/grub/menu.lst to reflect them.

[Vishal Gupta]

thnx for the tip ujjwal!
But is there no other way to reflect the changes in /boot/grub/menu.lst file automatically?

[Vishal Gupta]

ujjwal!
Can u pls tell me step-by-step method to recover it?
I lost SUSE boot loader after i installed XP again.
Now I hv no recovery floppy disk only hv SUSE setup CD.
Can u pls tell me what should i do now to reinstall the boot loader?
I hv xp installed on C:\drive, 98 installed on D:\ drive and rest for SUSE partitions.
thnx in advance...

[ujjwal]

Sorry I cannot give you step by step instructions, as I do not use Suse, but try booting in the Setup CD, and see if you either have a "rescue" mode, or some other mode which will give you a console. If you cannot find this, press CTRL+ALT+F2, and you should get a login prompt. From here, you can try the steps I mentioned in the previous post.

[Vishal Gupta]

Yes!
It shows Rescue mode.
But can u tell me the command to mount the partition?
I mean which partition I hv to mount?

I hv xp installed on C:\drive, 98 installed on D:\ drive and rest for SUSE partitions.

pls.
thnx in advance!

[ujjwal]

Post the output of fdisk -p here, that will give an idea of the partitions to mount. I would guess, if there is no seperate /boot partition, and the swap partition lies before the linux partition, the commands you need would be

mkdir /mnt/linux
mount /dev/hda7 /mnt/linux
chroot /mnt/linux
grub-install /dev/hda

If it does not work replace hda7 with hda6,8,9 and see (ls /mnt/linux) if the layout of /mnt/linux is similiar to the root of your linux partitions.

[Vishal Gupta]

thnx a lot buddy!
I got my boot loader back...