Well, lets say I'm not a fan of linux at the moment,

I had my Osx86 and windows installs running beutiful so i decided to get a bit adventurous....


When i installed osx i made 20gb partition free incase i wanted to play with some linux (get to know it). i just installed opensuse 11 with grub. Install went fine, but wouldn't you know Osx won't come up in grub. I tried everything to add the osx partition to grub (its /dev/sda1) but no matter what it comes up with an error (hfs partition error)

Am i f'd in the a, or can this be fixed?

if i where to boot onto a kalyway disc and erase the linux partition would that do it? or installing a second kalyway over linux? cause at this point, all i want to do is get my data off my osx partition and re-install everything

This is what I would do:

Windows XP installation CD->Recovery Console-> "fixmbr", "fixboot".
Install Acronis OS Selector. Your OS X partition should be listed.

Never install GRUB to the MBR. Install it to the root (/) partition instead.

This thread should be useful for you (tested and approved):Using GRUB with OS X

Thanks FrankOS_Scripting for the link. bookmark for future problems.

GRUB + Floppy = Yay!

well, i can't get into the recovery consol because it asks me for an adminstrator password, i give it and it doesn't work... so i booted back into windows and took my password off my account, it still won't work... i tried every password i would have used and i can't figure it out...

I boot my OS X using grub. Setup: One disk with win XP and Ubuntu, MBR: GRUB. Another with OS X (GUID).
Grub (MBR) boots OS X with kernel parameter pointing to the "boot_v8 file" (EFI) on a partition that is readable to grub (ext3 in my case) on my OS X hdd. (Same disk as OS X installation = Avoid 0x80/0x81 problem)

Grub rules!

kulos

Try blank password
works for me sometimes.

I do the same.

grub won't boot osx unless you give it a link with efi.
do the following wiht root user on linux (ie: open terminal, type "su -", password, then start stuff from that terminal ie. type gedit to edit text files, type firefox to start firefox as root:
1. download pc_efi_v80.tar.bz2 and get the booti_v8 file from it (search here or google or try http://www.mediafire.com/?0xxzx0xsumg) (extract with the command tar xjfv pc_efi_v80.tar.bz2, cd into it)
2. copy the file boot_v8 to your /boot/ directory (cp boot_v8 /boot)
3. edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, at the bottom of the file add:

title macosx
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/boot_v8
root=/dev/sda1

replace (hd0,1) and /dev/sda1 with your linux partition (NOT osx partition). Check out the file /boot/grub/device.map to see what (hd*) is mapped to what /dev/sd* in Grub. Usually Grub maps your /dev/sda1 to (hd0,0) (so grub counts from 0 where /dev stuff counts from 1)

if you want windows as well (though I think yast'll write this in automatically) add this:

title windows
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1

replace (hd0,0) with your windows partition and (hd0,1) with your linux one

when you got all this down in pc_efi screen which will come up when you chose it in grub menu on boot, hit esc and type in 80 for your /dev/sda, 81 for your /dev/sdb etc, targeting whichever physical hard disk device has your osx install on it.

thanks it worked a lot...


well i decided since i don't "have" to have linux i'm not goin to play with fire


i realized now, that i have 3 bootloaders set up on my computer, which isn't a good thing... i followed the wingrub tutorial, which didn't work (or so i thought)

then while playing with the grub settings i got it to boot into wingrub, which i got to forward me to the kalyway boot up menu... so i got into osx and moved my important files onto my parents external (havn't gotten mine yet )

now i'm going to reformat and reinstall everything, thanks for all the help!

I am a lazy bastard. That is why I always go for the most simple solution which, IMO, is allowing Windows to own the MBR and multiboot with Acronis OS Selector. That is why I recommend to install GRUB (if you want to try Linux) to the root (/) partition, not the MBR. This is the default for Mandriva Linux, one of most user-friendly distributions.