Hi Carlos, and thank you also for taking the time to reply to me. I will intersperse my replies to your questions below..... On 12/28/21 03:57, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 28/12/2021 07.53, Marc Chamberlin wrote:
Hello - I have an HP Spectre laptop that came with Windows 10 installed on it. It has a 1Tb SSD drive with almost 800Gb of unallocated space. I want to install OpenSuSE 15.3 x64 on this laptop as part of a dual boot system. I have done this many times in the past on other desktops and laptops but this time I am running into a couple of unexpected problems that is preventing the installation. I created an UEFI USB installation disk from the ISO file that I downloaded from the OpenSuSE downloads website.
How exactly did you create it?
I downloaded the "Offline image" for Intel or AMD 64-bit desktops, laptops, and servers (x86_64) from the website at https://get.opensuse.org/leap/ Next I used SuSE Studio Imagewriter to transfer the .iso file to a 64GB USB stick.
In the BIOS I turned off "Secure Boot" and set the boot order to allow booting first from USB devices. I did not have to choose whether to use "Legacy Booting" as there is no option in the BIOS for it.
Why turn off secure boot? Windows will complain, and openSUSE should install fine with it.
That was a suggestion I found from my Google searches in looking for a solution to this problem. I re-enabled it but it made no difference.
You did not tell Windows to reduce its disk occupation first? It is usually best.
I am not sure what you mean or how to go about doing this step. Could you shed a bit more light on what you want me to do? Are you asking me to turn on disk compression or reduce it's partition size or something else?
The installation of OpenSuSE starts off OK and I had no apparent problem with setting up the network WiFi connection. The installation process does not allow me to manually test and/or check to see if the network really got set up OK.
Yes, there is a way. There is a combination of keys to start an xterm on the graphical system of the installation. ctrl-alt-x, sihift-alt-x, some combo involving x. I tried it recently, it works, but there is a delay and did not locate the exact key combo. You can then run arbitrary commands there. Or simply type ctrl-alt-f1..f9 and find a working console.
ah, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+X
No worries, I used a different trick to figure out whether the WiFi connection is working, it is.... Ya gotta love secret incantations, like 'xyzzy' or 'plugh'. If you go back far enough in computers, you will know about the reference I made. ;-)
The first problem occurs when the installation process gets to where it is attempting to read the list of Online Repositories. Here I get a warning message "Unable to download list of repositories or no repositories defined." No reason why is given and all I can do about it is to click the OK button and move on. Maybe the WiFi network connection is not working after all? I dunno how to check it at this point in the installation process. Sigh...
This problem has gone away for some reason, I am no longer getting this error and I am able to download and install the repositories now.
Next I select for a System Role to use "Desktop with KDE Plasma" and when I click on Next I get a far more serious error message -
"An error was found in one of the devices in the system. The information displayed may not be accurate and the installation may fail if you continue."
The "Details..." button shows - "cannot delete MdContainer" and again I can only choose "OK" to dismiss this rather useless error message. I got no idea what an MdContainer" is! Google searches suggests it has to do with docker containers but that doesn't help me either as I don't grok much about docker and have never use it. The best discussion about this error, that I found, was at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/523095/opensuse-leap-15-1-install-s... But the solution appears to be to delete and remove Windows 10 and the partitions it resides in. NOT what I want to do, I want a dual boot system with both OS's. Another suggestion was to contact HP Support which I have done but they seem to be taking a very long time to respond, so I am turning to this forum to see if anyone here can provide and/or guide me to a solution.
FYI If I continue on, with the installation process, I reach a dead-end at the point where one is suppose to set up the disk partitions for OpenSuSE. The partitioner does not allow me to access or change anything within the SSD drive. Any attempt to do so, I get told the device is busy.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions or solutions offered, much appreciated as always... Marc...
The Windows partition may be encrypted; in a half way state waiting for you to create the password, but it makes reading it from Linux impossible. I forget the exact name, I should have notes somewhere... Or emails here.
bitlocker is the name of the thing :-(
I searched around for bitlocker in the Windows 10 OS installed on my laptop. Nearest I can grok this thing, it appears that bitlocker is not turned on and Windoz is whining and suggesting that I should turn it on for Drive C: This is the way it came from the factory, I have never touched the settings for bitlocker, not knowing what the costs/benefits are.... Marc... -- *"The Truth is out there" - Spooky* *_ _ . . . . . . _ _ . _ _ _ _ . . . . _ . . . . _ _ . _ _ _ . . . . _ _ . _ . . _ . _ _ _ _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . * Computers: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the user Marc. His mission: to explore strange new hardware. To seek out new software and new applications. To boldly go where no Marc has gone before! (/This email is digitally signed and the electronic signature is attached. If you know how, you can use my public key to prove this email indeed came from me and has not been modified in transit. My public key, which can be used for sending encrypted email to me also, can be found at - https://keys.openpgp.org/search?q=marc@marcchamberlin.com or just ask me for it and I will send it to you as an attachment. If you don't understand all this geek speak, no worries, just ignore this explanation and ignore the signature key attached to this email (it will look like gibberish if you open it) and/or ask me to explain it further if you like./)