Hello All! I am the latest to the dual-boot fraternity using XP and SuSE 8.2 Looking through the several posts on this topic, but can't find anything (yet) that covers this scenario. Anyway, below are the details...Thanks in Advance!!!! Objective: Load Windows XP and SuSE Linux 8.2 Pro with a Boot Loader to determine which OS to load at boot time. Accomplishments: Windows XP came preloaded. I went through the SuSE install which includes a partition utility. Well, I botched this and mistakenly wrote over the XP partition (don't worry nothing on it yet;) and need to start over (NOTE: SuSE worked real nice...I may just become a convert). Then what: I tried to start from scratch and recover the Windows XP system to it's state from the manufacturer. I successfully loaded (so I thought) the recovery of XP which automatically reformats the entire disk to NTFS. Problem: When I reboot (with the XP recovery) a GRUB prompt appears and I cannot get to XP. When I go to re-install SuSE I cannot 'resize' the forementioned XP partiion (says it cannot recognize the version or something to that effect). SuSE loads fine, but when I reboot (again) after installation there is no option to load XP just Linux and Linux Safe Mode. Question: At this point, I am pretty confident that everything will go fine if I simply reload Windows XP and start over. However, how do I this? GRUB comes up after my XP recovery and won't let me into XP? Any reccommendations? By the way, it wouldn't be all that bad if I just stuck with SuSE Linux...it's got a ton of stuff, really easy to use and never crashes!

you need to go into your system BIOS. (press the del key when your system says "press del to enter setup" or something like that or look into your manual) After that, you need to go to the boot sequence menu and select "cdrom" _before_ "harddisk", ie, if harddisk is 2nd then cdrom should be first. After that you can insert your system rescue cd and boot from it. If you're in an unlikely situation that the rescue cd cannot delete the linux partition, you can go into linux and type "cfdisk" as root and edit your partitions.

Hi Balram! Thanks for the response. Yes, I did edit the BIOS to look for the CD before booting off the disk and I am able to edit the partitions. However, after I "rescue" XP and the hard disk is 100% XP (or so I thought), I then try to boot off the disk (no floppy to boot from...the CD boots to Win 98 recovery) and I still get GRUB. I have tried this many ways including blowing away partitions. Also, the recovery process wipes the disk clean before doing anything else (and it worked...or it said it did). Remaining question: How come GRUB stays on after formatting the entire disk in NTFS? How can I simply start over with a clean XP install????? Thanks again for the response...keep 'em coming!!!!

Solved....I wasn't able to get into DOS mode during the recovery process (so I thought). When I did get in I simply used 'fdisk /mbr'. That did the trick!