Hi all. My system is an HP desktop workstation. Currently it’s a single boot of openSUSE 12.1 x86_64. I attempted to perform a clean install of 12.2 from the DVD (while preserving my /home volume) when I ran into an error after setting up the disk.
I imported my existing partition setup because I need to keep all of the data on my /home volume. No big deal, I’ve done this before. My existing partition layout is roughly:
Pretty standard little LVM setup there. Now, when I tried installing 12.2 (again fresh install) I configured everything to remain the same, I format /boot and the other Logical Volumes except /home. When I tried to accept the changes after reviewing carefully, I noticed a warning window popped up saying my setup wouldn’t work because there was no “boot” partition. Then it suggested that I set one up and have it on a separate partition from LVM.
Well I double checked what I configured it sure enough, it’s all setup correctly. Separate /boot partition, format as EXT4, sda1, 500MB. WTF.
Question to the community: why does the 12.2 installer think I don’t have a boot partition when I do?
Can I safely continue with the install since I know my setup is correct, in spite of the dire warning? Is this a bug?
Perhaps use a live cd or gparted live disk to pre-partition it. That way it has the boot partition already in place when you boot up to install openSUSE.
As indicated in my initial post, I have a /boot partition setup already. It’s /dev/sda1, mounted on /boot, 500MB in size, and formatted as EXT4. During the partitioning setup, I just configured the installer to re-format it as EXT4 so that the data will be wiped during install. I’ve done this many times without issue, but for some reason 12.2 thinks I have not setup a boot partition.
I’m mainly curious if anyone has run into this issue because it might be a bug in the installer.
Also, the installer warns me about the boot partition issue pretty severely, but it says I can continue if I “know what I am doing”.
On 09/10/2012 07:56 PM, beaconfield wrote:
> Can I safely continue with the install
that IS the question you should continue to ask yourself no matter what
anyone here says!!
because only you know (because you have not told us) if you have a
backup of all your data, music, movies, emails, letters, addresses,
phone numbers, photos, etc etc etc
safely backed up to a location NOT on the the hard drive, or anywhere on
the machine you are about to install to.
well, backed up and TESTED to see if you can both read the backup medium
and use it to regenerate usable data…
Doing an expert install is one thing. Selecting “import exiting partition” and “create partition setup” is another thing. If “import” didn’t get your /boot partition (don’t know why, as I never use this option), then choose “create partition setup”. It won’t “create” partitions. That’s not what it means. You could of course also create/delete partitions, but you’re not going to. Just select your partitions, mount points, fstab options, etc and do NOT format /home.
Notice that I’m only explaining what you can do with “create partition setup”. I don’t know why you’re having this issue with your /boot partition.
I rebooted the machine and entered F9 for the HP Boot Menu. I noticed that the first entry in boot list is UEFI DVD RAM DRIVE. Following that in order were the normal BIOS-based DVD Drive, and then the Hard Drive. So by default, the system was booting into its UEFI implementation of the DVD RAM drive, thus the installer thought I had a UEFI-based system. By default the 12.2 installer selected a partition scheme that included a 156.88MB partition for /boot/efi.
At this point I understood what was going on, so I rebooted and manually chose the option for the normal BIOS-based CD/DVD drive. It booted into the installer and suggested a normal /boot partition. I imported my partition scheme, customized it, and installed without any issues.