niczsoft

As everybody knows Windows does great job during installation – makes computer start only IT :)

There are many ways to make it working again with linux, my steps were:

• boot computer from some opensuse CD (should be possible with any)
• select rescue bootmenu entry
• if asked for user enter “root”
• enter “fdisk -l” to see yours linux device – for me it was /dev/sdb3 – first one with Id 83
• prepare access to your system
  

  mount /dev/sdb3 /mnt
  mount -o bind /dev/ /mnt/dev/
  mount -o bind /proc/ /mnt/proc
  chroot /mnt/ /bin/bash
  mount /sys

• now enter “yast2 bootloader”
• select Other (Alt+e) -> Propose new configuration (Alt+p), OK (Alt+o)
• exit chroot with “exit” and restart computer with “reboot”

steps up to chroot are know and are quite similar to installation of gentoo system, but “mount /sys” is something new and is required to make “yast2 bootloader” or “yast2 disk” working in chroot environment.

Even gentoo handbook says that good build kernel should work without initrd there are some cases that require it, that’s my case. I’m using build in raid from my motherboard, it contains intel ICH9 chipset, this is no true hardware raid, to work it requires software to be run. I have compiled my kernel with all required switches, but it was not seeing my root partition on raid device, so I have run this command

emerge genkernel; genkernel --dmraid ramdisk

This allowed me to boot my manually compiled kernel to run, just added generated initrd to /boot/grub/menu.lst, not sure if this was needed but I have also added option dodmraid to kernel in the same file.