I must start with openSUSE 11.1.  openSUSE 11.0 started with some hickups on my laptop, but finally, I got it configured completely. I was enjoying this distro and was eagerly waiting for 11.1.  However, I must say that I’m kind of disappointed with 11.1

My first disappointment started with desktop itself.  I have been upgrading my desktop from openSUSE 10.2 days.  So, I decided to go for a re-install instead of upgrade.  The first blow was in terms of inability to restore my MBR using grub.  I have a dual boot system and I knew that I will not be able to boot into Windows  XP if I format my ‘/’ volume without restoring MBR.

I tried all possible windows CDs and they all _consistently_ failed to restore MBR.  Further googling helped me to locate mbrfix.  mbrfix is a nice little windows executable that helps you repair some of the low level issues (if you know what you are doing)

I decided to create a small partition for /boot because of this bad experience.  Obvious choice was to split / partition and create a 100MB volume for /boot.  My partition table looked something like this now.

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12921 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000021

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        2174    16435408+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2           12193       12921     5511240   12  Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda3            2175        2452     2101680   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4   *        2453       12192    73634400    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            3808        5433    12292528+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6            5434        8142    20480008+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda7            8143       10174    15361888+  83  Linux
/dev/sda8           10175       12192    15256048+  83  Linux
/dev/sda9            2453        3795    10146937   83  Linux
/dev/sda10           3795        3807       96358+  83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

You might notice an out of order start point for sda10 and that was exactly what fdisk was trying to tell me. After successfully installing VMWare Workstation 6.5.1, I tried to bring up my existing VM. VMWare continues to complain about its inability to retrieve disk information.

Unable to retrieve disk information: The partition table on the physical disk has changed since the disk was created. Remove the physical disk from the virtual machine, then add it again

I tried to contact VMWare and no one could help me here.  I figured out after a lot of research that an out of order partition table can cause problems with many applications and VMWare is one of them.  The suggestion was to reorder partition table.  Fun started here.

Note: Do not try the following instructions unless you know what you are doing.  These changes require some knowledge about your disk layout and linux boot process.  I will not take any responsibility if you can’t boot into your machine after following the instructions.

I used fdisk’s expert mode and re-ordered my partition table.  I noted down my old partition table layout and mapped the start, end and Id with the new layout.  This is required to adjust some of the configuration files. It looks like this now.

Disk /dev/sda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12921 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000021

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        2174    16435408+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            2175        2452     2101680   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3   *        2453       12192    73634400    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda4           12193       12921     5511240   12  Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda5            2453        3795    10146937   83  Linux
/dev/sda6            3795        3807       96358+  83  Linux
/dev/sda7            3808        5433    12292528+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda8            5434        8142    20480008+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda9            8143       10174    15361888+  83  Linux
/dev/sda10          10175       12192    15256048+  83  Linux

This is not enough.  You need to readjust your boot order.  I did the following as well.

  1. Updated /etc/fstab entries based on the new partition layout
  2. Updated /etc/grub.conf and /boot/grub/menu.lst based. Note that, partition table starts from 1 and grub count starts from 0 (number Zero)

I rebooted my machine and it doesn’t find a valid boot record. I tried to use the recovery option from the install DVD. Though YaST says, grub is reconfigured, I still can’t boot. After further googling and some research, I decided to use grub command line option and re-intialize grub.

In grub command line mode,
grub> root (hd0, 5)
grub> setup (hd0)

Everything looks okay now and I’m writing this blog using Windows Live Writer from one of my Windows VMs hosted on my openSUSE 11.1.