"There's nothing on MBR but the blinking GRUB cursor." That's right. This is SUSE's GRUB. During installation of SUSE, YaST overwrites the MBR, but it saves a copy of the old MBR on the hard drive. If you want to restore it, you have to boot from the SUSE CD, open YaST, go to the boot loader configuration and choose the option "Restore MBR from Hard Disk" (or some similar wording; I have a rather old copy of SUSE).
Since you had deleted the SUSE partitions and installed OpenSolaris right away, I was not sure that the saved old MBR was still there. Even if it was, it would have probably been a mistake to restore it, because, according to SUSE manual, "A boot sector backup is no longer valid if the partition in question has a new file system. ... Obsolete backups are time bombs." Other than that, the only remaining option was to boot from the Windows XP CD and run fixmbr. The SUSE manual recommends it (you can read yours, if you have it), as well as numerous Linux HOW-TO websites, for example this: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-tutorials-howtos-reference-material/9921-uninstalling-linux.html# "Most people know how to uninstall their distro. But afterwords their presented with a black screen and GRUB asking for input." Windows fixmbr command must have restored the MBR to some new location, but not removed the old SUSE GRUB. I am not sure why the re-installation of OpenSolaris was not overwriting that GRUB. I wonder if that was one of the advanced options during installation? I have never had to go into such nitty-gritty, since all my OpenSolaris installs were fresh ones. Maybe some other forum participants have experience with installing OpenSolaris in a situation where some other GRUB is already present on the system? -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org
