Last night I thought it would be a good idea to check out OpenSuse, so I downloaded the DVD and burned the only DVD I had with the image. As soon as I got home, my vulnerable laptop was begging to keep windows at its heart, but in the end, after putting the OpenSuse DVD into the drive, it took complete control of the laptop and started the installation process.
The OpenSuse installation was very easy and did almost everything for me, apart from filling out my name etc. It shrank my windows partition, and created a load more to use itself. When I booted my laptop up in the morning, I got straight into my new operating system and started playing. When I realised my wireless card was not installed by default, I thought I should switch over to windows and get any drivers I needed. I restarted my machine and got the boot loader, and selected Vista. Much to my horror, I was thrown straight back into the OpenSuse installation.
After hunting around online for solutions, I finally found the app bcdedit.exe stored in the system32 directory on my windows install (I was running repair mode off the Vista CD). Running this, I could see all of my boot options and the paths they were using. I noticed that the path for windows was still “\grldr.mbr” instead of the windows default “\windows\system32\winload.exe”.
Using the following command in command prompt, I managed to restore my Windows Boot Sequence.
bcdedit /set {default} path “\windows\system32\Winload.exe”
{default} should be replaced with the Guid of the loader you need, however {default} should work for most windows installs.
Best solution at:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392