Ok, it appears to be solved.
Thanks, Patrick, for the link to the Win32 Disk Imager flash drive
installer builder. That created a flash drive that booted up
correctly and gave me the actual suse installation gui. Got to the
partition management section: it says I can't add another partition to
sda, even though it shows (correctly) 200G unallocated.
Ok, try the Windows disk management tool. Shows everything on C:,
just as suse had. Same error.
So, I download gparted. It installs correctly on another flash drive
using WDI. Booted; no interface. Fortunately, I'd read the
preliminary notes, so restarted in safe video mode. Now I see exactly
what I saw with suse and W10, so try to create a new partition in the
unallocated space. Finally, I know why it won't work: there are
already 4 primary partitions on the drive. You were right, Carlos.
Apparently I have to wipe the drive again and reinstall, making W10
create an extended partition before it creates the software partition
(it seems to have created the other 3 on its own? I don't remember
telling it to create primary partitions).
As I recall from long ago when you had to drag through all this stuff
just to do a basic installation, you can put only 4 primary partitions
on a disk; the alternative is to put up to three primary partitions
and one extended partition, into which you can put any number of
(secondary?) partitions.
Thanks, all. Learned a lot, solved my problem. Tomorrow or Thursday
I'll do it all again, hopefully correctly this time. Or maybe I'll
just extend the W10 partition to fill the unallocated space and use
suse under VB.
jp
On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 9:12 AM, Carlos E. R.
On 2017-05-09 09:06, Carl Hartung wrote:
Hi John,
I suspect there may be deeper issues going on with that specific (circa 2012) laptop. The initial clue you provided is the USB booted and running installer not being able to 'see' the primary drive.
From the Internets:
"... Hmm. I have a brand-new Samsung laptop NP700Z7C-S01US that has a flash drive described in the specs along with the main HD as "1 TB with ExpressCache™ Technology, 8GB". It shows in both Windows and suse as a separate hard drive. I've made no effort to use it myself. ..."
and
"Just found more info on the Samsung website:
"Innovative ExpressCache™* technology provides 8GB of flash memory on the motherboard that works as an ultra fast HDD. Its intelligent, automatic caching takes 45% less time to boot up and starts Internet Explorer and frequently used applications 2 times faster, while still maintaining the safety and integrity of your data."
Oh. Good catch. Bad news :-(
John also said it on his first post:
]> I get sda, sdb, and sdc, which I ]> take to be the hard drive, Samsung's 8G internal flash
openSUSE can not install using that internal flash at all.
Where to place the boot code? On the hard disk, or on that internal flash memory? We need some knowhow.
The paragraph is confusing, though:
]> I get sda, sdb, and sdc, which I ]> take to be the hard drive, Samsung's 8G internal flash, and the 16G ]> USB flash drive it just booted from. However, the install selection ]> can't see the USB flash and the "boot from hard drive" can't find a ]> bootable hard drive at all (W10 boots reliably from the hard drive).
What is that "USB flash" that it can not see? There should only be three media: internal hard disk, internal flash, and external install media.
Guessing, the internal hard disk may have 4 primary partitions defined, which impedes automatic Linux installation. Thus the install disk will not try to install, doesn't know how.
A run of
lsblk --output \ NAME,KNAME,RA,RM,RO,SIZE,TYPE,FSTYPE,LABEL,PARTLABEL,MOUNTPOINT,UUID,PARTUUID,WWN,MODEL,ALIGNMENT,HOTPLUG
maybe from a linux rescue disk, and posted here (or a photo of the output) would help.
-- Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R. (from 42.2 x86_64 "Malachite" at Telcontar)
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