Hey all,

I've tired installing Suse 9.2 (DVD) on my computer, dual boot. But everytime I do it Linux seems to kill my Windows install.

This is my setup, a 120GB HDD and for 30GB for Windows 60GB for Data and 30 GB for Linux.

Windows works fine, then install SuSe and that works fine. But when booting Windows it always comes up with a <Windows root directory>\System32\hal.dll file error. It has done this 3 times already. I've tired changing the partitions around a little (sizes), but still fails.

Any idea's how I can stop this?

Thanks in advance for the help

If you installed windows first, then moved the partition to put SuSE at the beginning of the disk you would get that problem as you have altered the layout.If you look in boot.ini you will see that the windows installation depends on you disk layout remaining unchanged.

By the way for 9.2, to make all the precompiled rpms available you will need to update your installation source to be on of the SuSE mirrors because the DVD doesn't contain quite a lot of commonly used apps.

Yeah I know about the updates. After a install it updates about 500mb of software and stuff.

When I do did change the partition config I did a fresh install on Windows as well. And I got the error 3 different times

So have you looked into "boot.ini" as suggested? I recently ran into the same problem after I installed WinXP on a new HDD, after I detached my CD-ROM from the system thus changing the drive specifications. For me, as the boot.ini is on a FAT partition, I could modify it with vim with my Debian installation and that partition mounted read-write.

Otherwise, you can always boot with the Windows installation CD (well ... I have done this a lot of times these days), log on the rescue console (couldn't remember how it is exactly called in English) and there is a command available for manipulating the Windows boot selection menu. For details, search in the Microsoft support KB.

i can't edit the boot.ini file as it wont even let me go past this error :-(

If you have SuSE working you should be able to mount the Windows partition (read only if NTFS) and at lease view the file.

Then log on the recovery console with the installation CD and use the bootcfg command. It can scan your disks for Windows installations and add to your boot menu list. Once you get back in, remove the incorrect items with the GUI.

Some relevant KB entries:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;289022
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;291980

Just search with the "bootcfg" keyword and you will find them.