Hi,
I’m siitting in front of my new HP Tower PC.
It came with Win7 preinstallaed on a 1,5 Tb disk, 100Mb primary (System), 1.36 Tb primary (c:) and 1,5 GB primary (D: rcovery disk).
I could use the Win/ tools to skrink c: to appr 700 Gb and got roughly 600 GB of unallocated space on the disk.
So now I’d like to install my OS of choice (you guessed it – OpenSuse) too.
I want to be able to dual-boot either to OpenSuse or Win7 once I’m done.
Reading the forums, it’s not clear to me if I should even try, UEFI being the potential stumbling block.
I’ve tried running 12.1 from a ‘live’ USB and it not only seems to work, it looks great.
The threads I’ve found in the forum so far agree – do not install from the live USB stick if you’re on a UEFI computer, you must use the DVD install.
I have the DVD so that’s not a problem, but trying to figure out from the threads if I can actually install from the DVD and have dual-boot functionality is not as easy to figure out
GRUB seems to be out of the question, GRUB2 might work (but is not on the DVD), so the recommendation is elilo.
So my simple(?) question is will it work to install from the DVD with elilo as boot manager to be able to dual-boot between Win7 and OpenSuse 12.1?
The short answer is no. But the long answer is provided in the article and the final answer is yes. You’ll have to install Grub2, which can be done automatically with updateGrub2 or manually - the method is detailed in these two articles.
> So my simple(?) question is will it work to install from the DVD with
> elilo as boot manager to be able to dual-boot between Win7 and OpenSuse
> 12.1?
But you have not proved that your current system is using UEFI. You need
the output of fdisk -l to be sure. If it is using classic partitions, then
grub legacy will be fine.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
DISKPART> list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 1397 GB 679 GB
Disk 1 Online 1397 GB 0 B
Disk 2 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 3 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 4 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 5 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 6 Online 14 GB 0 B
And after selecting disk 0
DISKPART> select disk 0
Disk 0 is now the selected disk.
Just an obscure comment (on my part) but you are asking GNU/Linux users to interpret MS-Windows commands. I know I would not dream of attempting that myself (having left MS-Windows in 1998 and having things changed significantly in Windows since then, not to mention that my memory going back 14 years has long since forgotten the minimal that I knew).
Is it not possible for you to boot to a GNU/Linux liveCD and then provide diagnostic information using GNU/Linux tools while running from that liveCD ? That might mean a bit more to some on this thread ? …
… anyway hopefully that is a MUTE point and others who know MS-Windows (in a GNU/Linux forum) will be able to help.
On 01/23/2012 06:56 PM, oldcpu wrote:
> others who know
> MS-Windows (in a GNU/Linux forum) will be able to help.
ha! i tried to read it and had no idea what was being relayed…or
why…so, i stopped reading…had i recognized it as windows i might have
written what you wrote, except i left windows in '95…so, “diskpart” is
a windows command, interesting…
–
DD
openSUSE®, the “German Engineered Automobiles” of operating systems!
On 2012-01-23 17:06, adomeij wrote:
>
> Trying to go slow and easy this time around
…
> Code:
> --------------------
> DISKPART> list partition
>
> Partition ### Type Size Offset
> ------------- ---------------- ------- -------
> Partition 1 Primary 100 MB 1024 KB
> Partition 2 Primary 702 GB 101 MB
> Partition 3 Primary 14 GB 1382 GB
> --------------------
>
>
> I would deduct (from previous comments) That I do not have a UEFI
> installed Win7 and That Grub would suffce?
My guess is that you have partition (primary) number 4 free. I would prefer
to see the output from Linux “fdisk -l”, though. I guess you have a similar
setup to my Compaq laptop. #1 would be the Windows Boot, #2 would be the
Windows system partition, and #3 the Rescue partition.
If my guesses are correct and you have free space as well (if not, you have
to reduce #2), then you can install creating first #4 as extended, using
all the remaining free space, and inside create at least three partitions
for Linux (using the install DVD): swap, root and home.
Then you have the choice of where to install grub: MBR or #4 with generic
boot code. I use the later.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
–Blush–
Sorry for the Win cmds & output, but the system is curently running Win7 so ‘I took what I could get’.
Should I feel bad about reading the forum from a Win machine too?
Look at the addendum I made to this article: Booting openSUSE on UEFI BIOS with ELILO and Grub2 (part II - Windows dual-boot )*. It shows how you can tell from Window which kind or partitioning it is using. I would assume that many UEFI systems were installed with Legacy BIOS setup. As I mentioned in the article, I had to install Windows 7 twice everytime (I must have tried 10 or 15 times) in order to run the UEFI setup. The first time, on a blank disk, it would always partitionate with MBR - which is totally wrong. The second time it would complain that the disk contains a MBR and refuse to run the setup. Well … one can not expect too much from Windows. But IMO, it might be a bug in the UEFI BIOS of that mainboard (my mainboard). Mac users/hackers remove the MBR support from the Windows install DVD, so that it will boot only in UEFI mode, because Windows fails to get the right information from their firmware ( = that it is EFI and that it has to partitionate with GUID and not MBR).
I wonder if you can see the pictures. In any case, you have to be logged in to see the pictures. AFAIK it’s a bug.
On 2012-01-24 00:06, please try again wrote:
> * I wonder if you can see the pictures. In any case, you have to be
> logged in to see the pictures. AFAIK it’s a bug.
I’m not logged in and I see the pictures. :-?
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
Although I should add that if your mainboard switchs UEFI mode automatically - according to the device (DVD) which has boot priority - you should make sure that you boot from the “non-UEFI” openSUSE DVD or just install from live CD (which doesn’t include UEFI setup - as far as I can tell). If you happen to boot in UEFI mode, you will have the opposite problem. It depends on how your UEFI BIOS sorts the boot devices. A normal openSUSE install DVD appears as two boot devices in UEFI BIOS, a live CD only as a single device. It is unlikely that your BIOS will pick the UEFI device though - otherwise you would already have a GPT based Windows. But the only way to know for sure is to call your BIOS setup and look:
if it has an option to set UEFI or Legacy BIOS (it will be set to Legacy BIOS in this case)
otherwise which device is going to boot next. It should be a NON-UEFI dvd in this case.
Dependant on how happy you are with terminal commands, and dependant on whether your PC has another USB port (and you another USB stick) BEFORE you install openSUSE you could first backup the MBR on your PC, so that you have a backup you can restore just in case. To backup you boot to the openSUSE liveUSB (originally from a liveCD) and open a terminal and type ‘su’ (no quotes and use as the password) followed by typing VERY very VERY carefully:
which will save the file ‘mbr=backup-windows7’ into the virtual (ram) disk that you have booted to. You now need to copy that file to ANOTHER usb stick (so that when you switch the power OFF you don’t lose the file). Type that ‘dd’ command very very very very VERY carefully as the slightest mistake and you could hose your master boot record of your PC.
Keep that backup file for as long as you have windows7 on that PC. Then if you decide to restore the MBR to a pre-openSUSE install state, just ask on this forum and an explanation can be given as to how it can be used to restore the MBR.
Did I say to type the ‘dd’ command very carefully ?
But @oldcpu, why not saving the partition table (in the following bytes)? This is the most important part. This backup won’t help to restore the partition table if something goes wrong. Actually the part your dd command intends to save is the one you could - almost safely - skip (under openSUSE at least*). So why don’t you use bs=512 here?
and keep also the two files mbr-backup-windows7-440 and mbr-backup-windows7-512 .
I used to keep both files, but found over time I never used the ‘mbr-backup-windows7-512’ but only the ‘mbr-backup-windows7-440’ on occasion. Typically one’s openSUSE install will carve up the partitions and when it goes to putting things back, one wants to restore their POST carved windows7 and figure out later what to do with the defunct openSUSE carved partitions. At least that is my limited experience on this.
