In the latest install I did (double boot machine), the installer
complained that the /boot/efi partition was too small (it was 100MB, the
installer asked for a minimum of 250MB) and if left as is, it was likely
that the system would not boot.
I tried to resize it, but the installer complained that it cannot be done
for that type of file system.
I deleted that /boot/efi partition, created a new one (500MB) and the
leap 15.0 installation went very well… except that now windows is not
an option anymore in grub2.
I (most likely wrongly) thought that it would picked up as I remembered
that there is an “probe foreign OS” in the installer… obviously I did
something wrong.
Looking in /boot/efi/EFI/ there is no windows or microsoft folder
anywhere (only /boot and /opensuse ones) but the /windows/C partition
exists and it is untouched.
Does anybody know if it is possible to fix this and make grub2 detect the
installed windows?
As the efi partition is normally (on of the) first partitions on a disk, you can not make it larger without doing a lot to what lies behind. It is not clear from your description what you did. It could be that you destroyed the/ Windows partition on the go.
In the latest install I did (double boot machine), the installer
complained that the /boot/efi partition was too small (it was 100MB,
the installer asked for a minimum of 250MB) and if left as is, it was
likely that the system would not boot.
I tried to resize it, but the installer complained that it cannot be
done for that type of file system.
I deleted that /boot/efi partition, created a new one (500MB) and the
leap 15.0 installation went very well… except that now windows is not
an option anymore in grub2.
I (most likely wrongly) thought that it would picked up as I remembered
that there is an “probe foreign OS” in the installer… obviously I did
something wrong.
Looking in /boot/efi/EFI/ there is no windows or microsoft folder
anywhere (only /boot and /opensuse ones) but the /windows/C partition
exists and it is untouched.
Does anybody know if it is possible to fix this and make grub2 detect
the installed windows?
Many thanks
-G-
Hi
Yes, you wiped it… AFAIK boot from the windows install media and
should be able to use the repair option to fix the booting…
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SLES 15 RC4 | GNOME Shell 3.26.2 | 4.12.14-18-default
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please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!
You should have just continued with the install, and ignored the message. I think there’s still an open bug report on that message being unnecessarily scary.
I deleted that /boot/efi partition, created a new one (500MB) and the
leap 15.0 installation went very well… except that now windows is not
an option anymore in grub2.
I (most likely wrongly) thought that it would picked up as I remembered
that there is an “probe foreign OS” in the installer… obviously I did
something wrong.
Grub picks it up, by searching the EFI partition. But, of course, there was nothing there for it to find.
I think there’s a way you can get Windows running, and it will reinstall its boot code. Maybe a google search will help. Or if you have Windows install media, boot it and ask it to repair your install.
If you took a backup of the old EFI partition, just restore the Microsoft directory and then “grub” will probably find Windows.
There is some mention of this in the release notes for the operating system, so I guess not unexpected. They are here , I think it is in section 1.3 or something.
On Mon, 04 Jun 2018 16:26:03 +0000, nrickert wrote:
> You should have just continued with the install, and ignored the
> message. I think there’s still an open bug report on that message being
> unnecessarily scary.
Yes it was too late when I realised that I should have ignored the
warning…
> I think there’s a way you can get Windows running, and it will reinstall
> its boot code. Maybe a google search will help. Or if you have Windows
> install media, boot it and ask it to repair your install.
Thank you I will look for this.
Just in case, if I am able to fix the Windows install that way, would I
lose the grub2 settings?
If so, is there a way of reinstalling grub2 and pick up both the Win and
the leap 15 installation (that would probably save me reinstalling linux).
> If you took a backup of the old EFI partition, just restore the
> Microsoft directory and then “grub” will probably find Windows.
I did not, unfortunately. I will make sure i do in the future, so I
learned something new too.
Thank you also to all of those who replied.
I will report back if I succeed (or not).
Leap 15 should still be intact. And if you can’t boot it, then that can be easily fixed (I think) without a reinstall. But you might have to boot into the install in order to do what is needed.
As for Windows, you can probably download the installer iso from the network, and use it to repair your system. But I’m not a Windows person, so best to google for help.
If you know of somebody with the same Windows version, also installed for UEFI booting, then copying the “\EFI\Microsoft” directory tree from their system to yours might allow grub2_mkconfig to find how to boot Windows (but I have never tried that).
On Mon, 04 Jun 2018 16:26:03 +0000, nrickert wrote:
> You should have just continued with the install, and ignored the
> message. I think there’s still an open bug report on that message
> being unnecessarily scary.
Yes it was too late when I realised that I should have ignored the
warning…
> I think there’s a way you can get Windows running, and it will
> reinstall its boot code. Maybe a google search will help. Or if you
> have Windows install media, boot it and ask it to repair your
> install.
Thank you I will look for this.
Just in case, if I am able to fix the Windows install that way, would I
lose the grub2 settings?
If so, is there a way of reinstalling grub2 and pick up both the Win
and the leap 15 installation (that would probably save me reinstalling
linux).
> If you took a backup of the old EFI partition, just restore the
> Microsoft directory and then “grub” will probably find Windows.
I did not, unfortunately. I will make sure i do in the future, so I
learned something new too.
Thank you also to all of those who replied.
I will report back if I succeed (or not).
-G-
Hi
No, boot code is in nvram, else if you press the boot menu key eg F12
or esc, does your system have the ability to browse to an efi file? If
so you can just select the openSUSE one… What is your system
brand/model?
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SLES 15 RC4 | GNOME Shell 3.26.2 | 4.12.14-18-default
If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,
please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!
On Mon, 04 Jun 2018 21:16:04 +0000, nrickert wrote:
> As for Windows, you can probably download the installer iso from the
> network, and use it to repair your system. But I’m not a Windows
> person, so best to google for help.
OK will do.
> If you know of somebody with the same Windows version, also installed
> for UEFI booting, then copying the “\EFI\Microsoft” directory tree from
> their system to yours might allow grub2_mkconfig to find how to boot
> Windows (but I have never tried that).
Yes, that is an idea, thank you for the suggestion.
Will report what I find out. Perhaps it might be useful to others.
By the way, apart from this issue, the rest of the installations I have
done went all exceptionally well and were straightforward.
The only issue I found was that it is not possible to import the mounting
points from a previous install, but I worked around that too.
Cheers
On Mon, 04 Jun 2018 22:05:58 +0000, I wrote:
> Will report what I find out. Perhaps it might be useful to others.
As suggested, booting with a Windows bootable medium and letting it fix
it seems to have worked OK.
That made the setup Win7-booting only, which I was expecting anyway.
Next booted with the Leap 15 usb in UEFI mode I reinstalled the system. I
could have spent some time looking into how to fix grub2 (which I am
still not sure of how to do), but I was short of time so reinstalling was
simpler :-/
What I have not been able to use in any of the Leap 15 installs I did was
importing the mount points properly. There is always some warning and had
to resort to add the mounting points manually (which also worked).
On Mon, 04 Jun 2018 16:26:03 +0000, nrickert wrote:
> I wrote:
>> In the latest install I did (double boot machine), the installer
>> complained that the /boot/efi partition was too small (it was 100MB,
>> the installer asked for a minimum of 250MB) and if left as is, it was
>> likely that the system would not boot.
> You should have just continued with the install, and ignored the
> message. I think there’s still an open bug report on that message being
> unnecessarily scary.
Just a further comment. After fixing the dual boot, I checked and the /
boot/efi partition with both leap 15 and win7 entries takes 92MB of
space, so while ignoring the warning and sticking to the original 100MB
configuration might have been OK in this instance, in the end it was
perhaps a good idea to have increased its size, in case I want to try an
additional OS/distribution on the same machine.
When I first installed Leap 15 into a virtual machine, it created an EFI partition of 33M. They later changed the installer to want 256M.
As I understand it (based on bugzilla comments), part of the thinking was that the UEFI specification recomment FAT32 for the EFI partition, and apparently 33M is too small for FAT32 so it had to use FAT16. Usually FAT16 works, but it is possible that some computers only support FAT32. Apparently, 256M is the minimum size for FAT32.
Checking on my main desktop, with Windows 8.1, the EFI partition is using around 25M for Windows and around 25M for Dell (the manufacturer, probably needed for recovery but never actually used by me). OpenSUSE is using around 18M, but that’s because I have some backups of boot code there. Without those backups, it is more like 5M.
Some linux distro (Solus and KaOS are two examples) put the kernel into the EFI partition. And once you do that, more space is needed.
> As I understand it (based on bugzilla comments), part of the thinking
> was that the UEFI specification recomment FAT32 for the EFI partition,
> and apparently 33M is too small for FAT32 so it had to use FAT16.
> Usually FAT16 works, but it is possible that some computers only support
> FAT32. Apparently, 256M is the minimum size for FAT32.
>
> Checking on my main desktop, with Windows 8.1, the EFI partition is
> using around 25M for Windows and around 25M for Dell (the manufacturer,
> probably needed for recovery but never actually used by me). OpenSUSE
> is using around 18M, but that’s because I have some backups of boot code
> there. Without those backups, it is more like 5M.
Hm… your post made me go again and check the sizes.
I am sorry, I was looking at /boot size from Dolphin, and there is indeed
92MB of stuff in there, but what I should have done is check /boot/efi.
That partition contains only 22MB of files, so you were right all along
and I could have ignored the original warning.
it was too late when I realised that I should have ignored the
it was too late when I realised that I should have ignored the