Bug 469143

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; tr-TR; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008121300 SUSE/3.0.5-1.1 Firefox/3.0.5

Making changes on the bootloader and then commiting it through yast caused me trouble. After making the changes, the machine did not boot, stayed at a black screen with a blinking cursor at the top left.

It happened to me three times. 
In the first one, I deleted a line (a boot option) from the bootloader and commited it. When I booted, I only got black screen. I tried to use the repair tool from the DVD, it detected a problem with bootloader, and tried to remedy it (every time I choose to repair, it failed at first and said that there was an error, tried the second time and claimed to have solved it), however, it was not successful as consecutive boots and reboots showed. At that time, I did not realize what the actual problem was, so I reinstalled suse from scratch, and as usual it worked. 

The second time, after changing the waiting time on the grub menu using yast and committing it, the next reboot brought me back to the black screen. I worked a little more to solve the problem using repai and rescue tools, however, it wasn't successful. At that point I thought that my harddisk partitions might be problematic, so I reformatted the extended partition and just to check installed Fedora 10, which worked, so once more -and after totally changing the harddisk layout- I installed Suse.

And once more after changing the waiting time on grub, I checked to see whether I was able to boot, and I wasn't. So I ran the repair tool and only this time I come to realize that there was a problem with the place where grub was written. I changed it to be written on the MBR and I was able to load the system.
(sorry if this detailed explanation is too detailed)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install grub to the extended partition or to the boot partition (where /boot is)
2. Start openSuse and start yast. 
3. Change something in the boot menu other than where it is stored (for example the waiting time, or the order of items)
4. commit the changes and restart the system 
Actual Results:  
When the system is restarted, a blank screen with a blinking cursor at top left greets the user. Neither boot menu, nor the system (or anything at all) is loaded

Expected Results:  
It is exected to see the boot menu just with the applied changes

This seems to be related to where the boot code is written. If it is written to the extended or boot partition (i.e. where the system boots from), the steps explained above cause the problem. It can be remedied by telling the repair tool to write the boot code to the MBR (and even after that, the repair tool reports an error with the bootloader but just skip it and the system boots fine)