XP Pro, SuSE Linux, and Vista Ultimate being forced to play nice

[Anonymous_354]

I have a problem. My master boot record is on a different partition than the bootloader I want. Is there a way to scoot things around to run the bootloader from the second partition?

If anyone is wondering, all the OS's are on the same drive, just different partitions.

XP has it's own 200Gb partition (current bootloader)

Vista has it's own 215Gb partiton (this is the bootloader I want to use);

SuSE has it's own partition of whatever's left (about 50Gb).

I've already tweaked the Vista bootloader, now I just need to tell the computer to use it.

Thanks.

[Seshomaru Samma]

Just install Grub to the MBR and you should be fine , you don't need to tweak Vista's bootloader nor XP's.

Get some live CD (this Gentoo-based LiveCD is the fastest, an Ubuntu or Knoppix will do)

when you get the command prompt go:

grub

then :

find /boot/grub/stage1

replace the ?? in the following command with the output of the previous command :

root (hd?,?)

(probably root (hd0,1))

then:

setup (hd0)

and

quit

Grub will be installed to the MBr and should give you the option of booting XP or Vista or SuSE

[Anonymous_354]

Is there a way to find out which partitions are called what?

[Seshomaru Samma]

Well Grub should recognise them automatically

If you want to know the partitions' name ,boot from a LiveCd and run this command:

fdisk -l

(if you it's an Ubuntu Cd , the command is "sudo fdisk -l")

(-l is lower case L )