On 12/31/21 17:48, DennisG wrote:
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I suggest taking a closer look at the Optane question. On your system it is nvme1n1 paired with nvme0n1 (and are always seen and accessed as a pair). There are articles and forum posts (Manjaro, Arch, Ubuntu, etc.) about difficulties installing to or booting from a system with this device. Too complex to regurgitate here, especially since there can be multiple causes. But it is important to differentiate between installation vs boot vs using the device for a tertiary purpose (like swap or /var). I did see a passing remark that Fedora and openSUSE were installable, and in fact, openSUSE provides the ipmctl toolset for managing an Optane device. However, that info did not mention co-existing with Windows. All that said . . .
An interesting case I found was that linux could not be installed even after Windows was completely removed. It turned out that some of Windows had been cached to the device and consequently the machine was mistakenly still trying to boot Windows. While I found use cases accessing the Optane device like typical additional storage, I could find none where (a) the device is enabled and (b) linux would share the boot partition with Windows. You mention that Windows boot time is <3 sec and transactions are almost instantaneous; this would be consistent with Optane being used for those functions. Intel allows for files/directories/applications to be "pinned" to the Optane; this could have been done by HP to provide the performance you've seen rather than waiting for Optane to "learn" which functions it thinks should be cached (that's the default behavior).
One thing you could attempt would be to disengage the Optane device (there are Intel tools on your machine to do this and/or it may also be doable/required in the bios) and then try the openSUSE installation. If the installer sees the storage, you know that this is likely where your problem is. Just keep in mind the above case, because apparently even disengaging it, while allowing installation, it still may not allow openSUSE to boot. If openSUSE still does not install after disengaging Optane, it could be that the module/drivers need to be explicitly called on the installation grub2 command line. Maybe an easy way to test this would be by trying a Fedora install.
Finally, if linux can be installed but it is not bootable sharing the Windows boot partition, my understanding is that another separate efi partition can be added for this purpose. I've never tried doing this with openSUSE, but I know it can be done with Fedora.
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A detail I forgot . . . re removing the Optane device as mentioned previously, just note that doing so once the device has been paired to storage, said storage will not be accessible at all unless and until the module is replaced. --dg 15.3