On Thu, 2019-03-21 at 15:18 +0100, Olaf Hering wrote:

A recent Tumbleweed snapshot removed master-boot-code. What is the replacement, has the replacement been tested?

The code in master-boot-record.rpm did just look for a primary, active partition and loads/runs the startup code from that partition. What I learned the hard was a couple of times is that Windows, after certain updates are installed, will not boot anymore unless its boot partition is marked as active in the partition table. I think sometimes it would refuse to install certain updates if its boot partition is not marked as active.

Olaf

According the information provided with the del req for master-boot- code (which, by the way was broken for a long time - see http://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1125307 ) the replacement is to use /usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin as provided by syslinux instead of the .mbr provided by m-b-c. Cheers Dominique

On 21/03/2019 15.18, Olaf Hering wrote:

A recent Tumbleweed snapshot removed master-boot-code. What is the replacement, has the replacement been tested?

The code in master-boot-record.rpm did just look for a primary, active partition and loads/runs the startup code from that partition. What I learned the hard was a couple of times is that Windows, after certain updates are installed, will not boot anymore unless its boot partition is marked as active in the partition table. I think sometimes it would refuse to install certain updates if its boot partition is not marked as active.

Re the Windows part: Yes. Assuming non GPT disk. Yes, let the disk have a standard MBR, and mark the grub partition as bootable, then install grub there. When you need to update windows, change the boot mark to the Windows partition, when finished the update, undo boot mark with rescue disk. This is a nuisance. What I use is what Neil Rickert suggested time ago: https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2016-04/msg01023.html The MBR is replaced with one that ignores the boot mark and always boots the one you want, that has grub. And, the Windows partition is marked bootable, but ignored. Windows is happy, boots from grub, and updates happily. I use that with my laptop that had W7 and now W10, so the thing works :-) -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.0 x86_64 at Telcontar)