James Little @ NZfusion.com

Wow… I started this exercise on Sunday, expecting windows to take a couple of hours to install and for everything to go swimmingly! If you are reading this, I probably don’t have to tell you that I was wrong!

Before talking solutions, I will describe some of my problems… and they don’t all relate to Windows, or Linux. I might as well add, I am a fan of Linux and also BSD, I’m not really an expert - those guys tend to have longer hair and much more knowledge/experience than I have. But my problems:

1. My D-Link Wireless ADSL Router will not allow many of my Linux based applications to resolve IP addresses through the DNS… I suppose it thinks these apps are viruses or something - they include Firefox, Mozilla and wget, but not ping or Konqueror… this makes Linux a pain to use.
2. I have 2 disks, with a total of 5 partitions. Windows is treating the wrong partition as the ‘C’ drive on install, writing the boot information there!
3. I can’t find a way of writing Grub using the openSuse Rescue, Install, or liveCD!! Which has meant a new Linux install every time I try to install Windows (which I did twice before realising there was boot information for it to write in the wrong place!).
4. This takes ages, and then Windows requires all the drivers for hardware components anyway!

Ok, so the picture is drawn, I’m having problems… which I suspected could be solved with a little knowledge? So how were my disks partitioned?

• /dev/sda1 is ntfs - it is where I wanted windows to put the C drive
• /dev/sda2 is fat32 - this is where I have some files, mostly movies that I want to keep.
• /dev/sdb1 is ext3 - this is my root linux partition
• /dev/sdb2 is ext2 - this is my home linux partition
• /dev/sdb3 is fat32 - this is another file partition

/dev/sda2 is where windows keeps installing boot data files. When I used the windows partition managed to delete and create the partition itself, it created it as an extended partition… which possibly caused all of my problems.

I used fat32 partitions because Linux could read and write to these at the time of install, and ntfs access was still not stable. This allows shared partitions between Linux and Windows. This was done a while ago and most are now full of data… I was contemplating burning the data onto CD…

However, there are some tricks that can be played… if you have a liveCD or the install CD, you should be able to boot into a system and mount the disks that you want to use.

ntfs formatted disks (in openSuse 10.3) should be mounted using a command similar to:

• mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /windows/C

this will allow you to write to the disk, and solve the boot problem. But in my case, it was trying to boot the wrong disk, this can also be edited… but I tried to re-enable the Grub boot loader.

• mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
• chroot /mnt
• grub –batch < /etc/grub.conf

But do you believe this didn’t work? It was close, but it didn’t understand the disk data? Which left me to reinstall Linux again, but this time I did it from the liveCD, this was much quicker than the full Linux install for openSuse…

Anyhow, back to installing the Windows drivers…

• motherboard network and sound drivers
• nvidia graphic drivers

And then the applications that actually do the work! I am really not a fan of system admin… especially when there are important things I could be doing instead. Happy new years everybody!

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