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A common problem with dual booting a machine with Windows and Linux is that the ZENworks Image Safe Data and GRUB bootloader attempt to write to the same part of the disk, starting at Sector 6.

As stated in TID 3414734 as of ZENworks 7 SP1 the ZISD can now be written anywhere between sector 6 and 63.

Ziswin is now capable of detecting if GRUB is present and write the ZISD to another sector.

However if you install Windows first, ZISD will be written to sector 6, if you then install SLED and configure it to dual boot using GRUB, GRUB will overwrite the ZISD. If your environment is set up to PXE boot you could end up inadvertently re-imaging the windows partition.

We install SLED using an autoyast script and to work around this issue we automatically relocate the ZISD with a pre-install script using the following commands:

#!/bin/bash
# preinstall.sh
# Script to relocate windows image safe data to prevent GRUB collision
# Adam Hobbs and Steven Knapp - Kingston University London
# July 2008
 
 
 dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/zisd skip=5 count=13 bs=512
 dd if=/tmp/zisd of=/tmp/label bs=1 count=4
 label=`cat /tmp/label`;export label
 
         if [ "$label" == "ZISD" ] ; then
 
         echo "Need to relocate ZISD"
 
         dd if=/tmp/zisd of=/dev/sda seek=16 count=13 bs=512
 
         else
 
         echo "ZISD is OK"
 
         fi
		 

You can place the script on an nfs/http server and call from an autoyast answer file with the following lines.

  
 	<scripts>
      	<pre-scripts config:type="list">
      	<script>   
      	<feedback config:type="boolean">false	</feedback>
  <location>nfs://myserver/mypath/preinstall.sh	</location>
       	</script>
      	</pre-scripts>
</scripts>

Set feedback to "true" if you need to check if it is working.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.