Multi boot loaders?

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Anyone got any recommendations as the best (or easiest) to use? Had a bit of a disaster last night and couldn't get GRUB back into working order and had to resort to a FIXMBR to get things working again. Looking for ideally something that is *really* easy to get into and edit or fix when things go wrong.

 

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It really depends on which OS's you are using, as they are all of a simillar nature in that you shouldn't mess with them unless you know what you are doing.

If it's Linux that you are using then GRUB or LILO are the two most common ones.

 

First: What happened? "A bit of a disaster" isn't what I would call a concise explanation of any problem so it's pretty hard to help.

Second: Grub is the easiest of the boot loaders to work with.

 

Sorry, "Bit of a disaster" means I could boot to SUSE but the sound problem I had managed to fix re-manifested itself. Decided to go back to windows for a while to relax and play some games but instead of the regular planned shutdown, I think I had a bit of a power blip and ended up watching my PC try to reboot 5 or 6 times before finally getting to see the Grub menu come up. Grub started complaining about a missing graphics file (the pretty Suse boot menu) so I started the text version. However, none of the boot options worked (Suse, windows, floppy & suse safe mode). Tried a few hints on Google but had no joy with any of the repairs. Had to resort to disconnecting the Linux drive and booting from my XP CD to do a FixMBR. To be fair, I don't think the bootloader was at fault and it was definitely the power blip that caused the problem as I spent the next half hour or so sorting out the windows errors I was getting.

Back to the point tho, do you have links to any good Grub documentation Freddy? The ones I found weren't great to say the least.

 

RIPLinux has a tool called grubconfig that will install/reinstall grub. You can also do a reinstall of grub from live cd's such as Knoppix also.

Here is the Grub manual.

Here is a link discussing how to use a SuSe install disk to repair/reinstall Grub.

The book Knoppix Hacks also has generic instructions on how to fix/reinstall Grub on any Linux system using the Knoppix live cd. I've done it on dual boot systems using Knoppix so I know that it works.

 

Many thanks for that Freddy. I'll give it another go soon and let you know how it goes!

 

If you can't get grub to work - then


Don't forget - there's also LILO

 

also...

Another one I used for setting up suse and win98 was GParted it looks similar to partition magic! and it's free!

it's a live cd so you will need to burn it first before use -
gparted

Which version of Suse are you using - Lord Deckard?