SuSE: How to restore a windows boot loader to MBR

Chris

hi; the OP never did - and in the OP's particular scenario, i'm not sure what exactly is the correct course of action -- and my comments are merely meant as 'cautionary', or a "please take into account all the possibilities" type of comment..not accusatory of anyone in any way at all.

Note also the OP is using a Laptop - which are (most times) OEM pre-loaded with the windoze OS, and many times contain a small FAT 'hidden' backup parbreastion (OS restore image) in and of themselves on the HDD...some come with Restore CDs, and still others require you to make your own restore CDs from the hidden parbreastion.

Now, if (as i like to do) the OP originally wiped the HDD as soon as s-he bought it an installed a Retail (or even another diff OEM) version of XP, then s-he likely setup (parbreastioned and formatted) the HDD themselves using XP's built-in Disk utilites (DISKPART, FORMAT, etc).

Speaking of Laptops -- my mistake, in that it's highly unlikly the HDD is a 'large' HDD (over 137GB) -- so my DDO software warning can generally be ignored in this instance. However, the Laptop manu OEM, may still have created a 'funky' parbreastioning scheme on the HDD. Most cheaper Dell Dimensions do this, and the actual 'Boot' parbreastion is the 2nd on the HDD, not the 1st, which is usually reserved for Dell's 'hidden' FAT16 (~32MB) diagnostic tools. Many OEMs carry out this 'type' of scheme.

Many people also use the HDD manu "utilities" (EZ-DRIVE, MAXBLAST, ONTRACK, etc) - not to mention 3rd party parbreastioning tools such as Parbreastion Magic -- either to 'clone' from an older HDD to a new HDD - and some use the DDO software to overcome BIOS limitations of HDDs larger than 137GB (48bitLBA issues, requiring atleast windoze 2KSP3 or XPSP1)...and many don't even realize that by using DDO, they've created 'custom' parbreastion table signature bytes.

Fortunately, atleast when using FIXMBR, one is presented with a "warning" - IF the command finds a 'nonstandard parbreastion table signature' -- then atleast the User is presented with the option to continue or not at that point.

here's some related text; =============================================

Caveats

That's how the standard Master Boot Record (MBR) works, and as this exists at the system rather than Operating System (OS) level, it's not supposed to be deviated from this behavior by any OS.

But because OSs buttume this code to be standard, they may replace it with the standard code. This would break deviations from the standard MBR code and parbreastion table structure, such as the following:

* Boot managers residing in MBR * Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO) driver * Boot code viruses that infect the MBR

If you need non-standard code here (e.g. a DDO to override an old BIOS's disk services that can't cope with "large" hard drives, or a boot manager that lives in the MBR) then you need a way to restore this should anything corrupt the MBR or overwrite it with the standard MBR code.

Also, remember that other boot devices (CDR, diskettes, USB flash drives, other physical hard drives) won't process this "special" code unless the same logic is integrated into the boot-up code of these devices =============================================

and while the info here is somewhat older and perhpas a bit defunct - it goes to my point;

In Ending; SuSE (and-or grub) seem to have the situation well in hand and seems to have 'preserved' whatever was there prior to installation...and is offering to replace it. I hope it works out easily for the OP. All I can say for sure is Backup, Backup, Backup your important Data ;-)