[vox-tech] 911 waa!!!

[Jimbo]

Suse has a knoppix like live cd in which it is the OS on cd.  I d/l the iso,
burned and viola, worked liked a charm.  I was so happy to see that my
printer is recognized and I loved seeing network neighborhood on my desktop
and was able to see my other computers on my network that run windoze xp!
In gui!  Wow.

I go to frys, buy the 9.1 personel boxed edition, and go about installing it
on my xp hard drive.  After installation all I got was a black screen with
the word GRUB in the upper left hand corner of the screen followed by a
cursor.  No imput of any kind using my keyboard was recognized.  In
desperation, I tried to install it again going thru the same procedure as I
did before (using yast).  Same results.

I shut down, installed another hdd that has a fresh xp install (my backup)
and slaved the foresaid hdd.  I can see my data fine so I am slowly moving
my pics d/l's txt and the like.  No big deal, looks like reformat city.
Have done it a thousand times.

Well...I pop in my xp cd, which is recognized by the cd rom, but it fails to
boot from cd when imputed via keyboard.  Hangs at a black screen and then no
keyboard imput.

Googling shows that I may have to rewrite the boot sector but cd has to boot
first.  I tried slaving it again and xp cd boots fine but cannot repair boot
sector on affected hdd with either the fixmbr or fixboot commands as
described from various web sites.

My theory to my delima is that I didn't defrag my xp os before I installed
suse therefore resizing the partition nutted up.

I want to have this still work w/o formatting but am at a loss as to why my
xp cd doesn't boot at all.  I can even take out all my hdd's and the xp cd
still boots.

Would it be possible to bring my troubles to the next installfest?  Maybe
lert?  I am worried that by going to the installfest I will hit another
brick wall for there is no internet access. Has this changed?

I am trying so hard to convert to linux but this experience has really
dampened my spirits.

Jimbo