You really should become familiar with the SuSE online Support Database. Doing a search on unable to open initial console reveals the following: Symptom: When booting the message Unable to open an initial console appears. The system freezes. Cause: This message appears exactly when it is being tried to open /dev/tty1 while it is not there. Reasons for this: wrong root partition /dev/tty1 got erased You're booting with the bootdisk supplied with version 4.3 of S.u.S.E. Linux 4.3 and the root-filesystem is located on an UMSDOS partition (demo mode) Solution: 1. Wrong root partition : If you boot with LILO, specify the correct root partition at the LILO prompt. In our example this will be /dev/sdb1 : LILO: linux root=/dev/sdb1 You should then adapt /etc/lilo.conf (don't forget to call /sbin/lilo afterwards). 2. /dev/tty1 got erased : Start the rescue system. Mount the root partition on /mnt and recreate the device (see also maddin_devices2.html): mknod -m600 /mnt/dev/tty1 c 4 1 3. For the UMSDOS problem : Get a new bootdisk from ftp.suse.de:/pub/suse43/disks/modboot1. - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e