On Sat, 11 May 2019 20:11:25 +0200 "Carlos E. R." <robin.listas@telefonica.net> wrote:
On 11/05/2019 19.58, Stephen Berman wrote:
I bought a computer with Leap 15.0 preinstalled on an SSD,
New, from a shop? What brand/model? I'm curious, selling Linux preinstalled is rare.
New, from https://www.tuxedocomputers.com
and I also wanted to install Tumbleweed on the disk. For reasons detailed below, I did this without installing a bootloader for Tumbleweed, but since Tumbleweed is frequently updated, including grub2, I think it would be better to install the bootloader in Tumbleweed. Due to my lack of knowledge, I would be grateful for advice on how to do that safely. Some specifics follow about the disk and what I did to install Tumbleweed.
The SSD had three partitions: /boot, / (root) and swap. I shrank the root partition (formatted as ext4) and added a btrfs partition for Tumbleweed. I first left /boot and swap as is, but the Tumbleweed installer said there was no bootable partition (I don't remember the exact wording, something like no BIOS boot table). I then tried deleting the /boot partition and adding it again, selecting "BIOS Boot" as the partition ID, but the installer still said there was no bootable partition. I also tried different file systems to format /boot -- originally it was FAT and I also tried XFS and ext3 -- but that made no difference.
It is *another* partition. Very small, perhaps 8 megabytes.
I'm not sure what you're referring to; there were definitely only the three partitions I listed, and the size of the /boot partition was (and still is) 500 MB (out of a 500 GB disk).
Why didn't you ask here before doing changes?
As I wrote, I only changed the root partition, not the /boot partition. In hindsight, I should have asked here before even attempting the installation, since, while I've installed GNU/Linux (and in particular (open)SUSE) systems for many years, this is the first time I'm using a separate boot partition (also the first time I'm using a GPT disk). Nevertheless, when I encountered the boot loader problem I decided to forge ahead (without changing /boot), hoping that in the worst case, I would just be able to go back to where I started from. And as far as I can tell, that still seems to be an option. But if I do that, I hope someone can tell me either how to install the bootloader for Tumbleweed in the existing /boot partition or how to make a /boot partition that the Tumbleweed installer recognizes. This must be possible, because if I let the installer suggest a partition scheme, it does suggest a separate /boot partition; however, that scheme would have overwritten the Leap 15.0 installation. AFAICT the only way to avoid that was to manually partition the disk, but as described, when I did that the installer said there was no bootable partition.
So finally, I left the /boot partition unchanged but unmounted it and proceeded with the installation. At the summary I then changed the boot setup to prevent any boot loader being installed and any changes made to the MBR. The installer said I might end up with an unbootable system, but I went ahead anyway. The installation completed and on rebooting the boot screen showed only Leap 15.0 as before, but after running grub2-mkconfig in Leap, Tumbleweed was found and I could boot it and it seems to be fine.
The disk has GPT with protective MBR. As noted the /boot partition is formatted as FAT and also contains a directory efi, which is populated in the running Leap, which mounts /boot/efi,
Well, first step would be to recover the original.
Again, the /boot partition is unchanged.
but in the running Tumbleweed, where /boot is not a separate partition, after mounting the partition Leap sees as /boot/efi, the efi directory is empty (in the running Tumbleweed). I do not plan to install any MS-Windows system, but I do plan to install other Linux-based systems besides Tumbleweed, and possibly a *BSD system. How can I install the bootloader in Tumbleweed -- either from the currently installed Tumbleweed or by reinstalling it -- without risking making both Tumbleweed and Leap unbootable? If that requires deleting the existing /boot partition and add it anew, is it necessary, given the systems I plan to install, to have the efi directory, and if so, do I just have to make /boot/efi a mountpoint, and if not, what else to I need to do to make sure it exists and gets populated as required (if it's required)? And if the efi directory is not needed, what would be the recommended file system for the boot partition?
Please run this script after booting into openSUSE and post results to 'SUSE Paste' (http://susepaste.org/)
https://github.com/arvidjaar/bootinfoscript/raw/master/bootinfoscript
This script does not recognize the disk containing the /boot partition (it searches for device names beginning with hd, sd, vd or xvd, but my SSD is at /dev/nvme0n1). Steve Berman -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org