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?
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. You did not tell Windows to reduce its disk occupation first? It is usually best.
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 https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:YaST_tricks
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...
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 :-( Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2020 00:51:19 +0200 (CEST) From: "Carlos E. R." <robin.listas@telefonica.net> To: OS-en <opensuse@opensuse.org> Subject: [opensuse] Strange partition on new computer Message-ID: <alpine.LSU.2.21.2009040041210.7232@Legolas.valinor> The partition table was: p1 260 MB EFI p2 16 MB Microsoft reserved partition p3 475 GiB Bitlocker Partition p4 1 G NTFS Partition The solution was to remove encryption. Jump in that thread to the answer from Andrei Borzenkov, the [solved] message is in that subthread. Two subthreads by Andrei, actually. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.2 x86_64 at Telcontar)