11.3 took 5 goes to install, doesn't boot without assistance and can't upgrade

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I had a working setup of opensuse 11.0, dual booting using grub installed on the home partition. I tried to install 11.3 from the coverdisc of linux format (LXFDVD136). It took 5 goes before the install succeeded. Mostly stopping at the “boot installed system” stage.
I put 11.3 on a formatted partition in the same place as 11.0, and put grub there too.
The system will not boot without assistance. I have to use a supergrub disc and tell it which partition to boot. If I use boot linux from supergrub I get the Grub error message 15 file not found. Supergrub CAN find windows and it boots with the win command.
Automatic and yast initiated attempts to check for software upgrades are blocked by the application with pid 4587.

#2

If you can boot to SUSE and get this info:

Open a terminal and become su -

fdisk -l

and

cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

You could just try this:
Re-Install Grub Quickly with Parted Magic

#3

On 2010-10-10 20:06, caf4926 wrote:
>
> If you can boot to SUSE and get this info:
>
> Open a terminal and become su -
>
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> fdisk -l
> --------------------
> and
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
> --------------------

And “file -s /dev/sd*”.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

#4

I re-installed from scratch using the same DVD. This time I let the installer put Grub in the MBR. It didn’t sabotage the boot of Vista (as earlier versions did) and the installer correctly identified the partition where Vista is installed.

I wish I had done that in the first place, thank you to everyone who replied.

There is still a minor problem with the updater (on first install). It pretends to be looking for updates and will not be closed. In so doing it blocks the access of manual updates through Yast. The cure is to re-boot.

#5

Thats rather dastic. If it is running in the lower right corner of your desktop (as it does in KDE) then simply close it. Or worst comes to worst type:

ps -A

(note that is a capital ‘A’) and then identify the process ID.

For examle, lets say it is ID 3711 called kupdateapplet as you see something like:

 3711 ?        00:00:01 kupdateapplet

then you can kill it by typing:

kill -9 3711

Its a lot faster than rebooting. :slight_smile: