I am at wit’s end right now, I’ve been racking my brain trying to fix this for the past few days all to no avail. Here’s the issue: I have a new (cheap) Toshiba Satellite C55-B, I blew out Windows 8.1 and want to make it a dedicated OpenSUSE laptop. Fine, lacking a CD/DVD drive I had to create a USB from the Live image, again no problem. Trying to load the installer gave me quite a headache, black screen when loading anything from the installer’s grub menu, fixed by using nomodeset. Installed all fine and dandy with the default settings on everything (I can make changes later, this box is just a play thing and work tool anyway) and when it comes time to reboot I changed the boot order back to HDD first.
Upon reboot I am greeted to the Installer menu, I reboot and manually select the HDD and it passes right over it to the USB and I once again get the Installer menu. If I remove the USB from the boot order in the BIOS I get the message telling me to insert bootable media. Not even a whif of it wanted to even try loading grub first.
I can boot into my OpenSUSE install by using the Installer USB and telling it to boot from my drive. I have tried everything I know to get the installer to fix the boot problem, I tried selecting Grub and Grub2 instead of Grub2-EFI, tried making a new partition table (FAT /boot, ext4 /) instead of the generated one (FAT /boot/efi, ext4 /) even tried changing filesystems to BtrFS instead of ext4, with and without a separate /home partition, with secure boot enabled and disabled, nothing works. I must admit I am not knowledgeable enough to attempt to rebuild grub while booted into my install or if that would even solve the issue. Any insights?
You said that you changed the boot order so HDD is first.
If that is done properly, then the only way the above can happen is if you are still pointing to install sources. You cannot see that if you are pointing to a properly installed distro (of any type, not just openSUSE).
Possible causes:
You’re still pointing to your USB (You can physically remove your USB install to verify this isn’t the case)
Your “Install” simply copied the install files to your HDD. Depending on the type of install, this may have been a first step in installing, and your installation has not completed. Or, your USB install is just faulty.
You might describe what reference you’re using to install from USB (primarily how you created your USB install).
To created the install USB I have tried using both the SUSE ImageWriter and ImageUSB tools to copy the image, which was downloaded from both the direct link and a mirror and checksum’d correctly. No combination of any of that worked.
I did think it might not be pointing to the right place when I changed the boot order in the BIOS but when I remove the USB I get the please insert bootable media nonsense. I also thought that maybe the install wasn’t fully completed but after going through the auto-config and then applying all 300+ updates to the system that were found, I still have the same issue so OpenSUSE is fully installed… just not bootable on it’s own for some reason.
Looking in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg shows the option for OpenSUSE is pointing to the UUID of /dev/sda3 which is my root partition. (/dev/sda1 is my FAT /boot/efi and /dev/sda2 is my swap)
From YaST, I see the boot loader selected is Grub2-EFI, but I’ve tried it with just Grub2 to no avail.
Have to assume that this machine has an EFI BIOS. It is best to stay with e EFI install so you need to be sure that you boot the install media as EFI. Should be selectable from the BIOS boot menu. Also be sure that secure boot is off. You should then see that a small FAT partition is slated to be installed and mounted as /boot/efi You should also have swap, root and home partitions
It is still unclear how you made the USB??? The basic idea is to do a binary copy of the iso without any changes or extra programs to the device (not a partition)
Image writer may not work in a Windows 8 environment but ImageUSB has been reported to work.
From a Linux OS you can simply use cp to copy the ISO to the device NOT a partition on the device. That is the way I do it.
If you install the OS as EFI You must then boot it as EFI not MBR
I’m not sure of the details on how the two programs I used work. ImageWriter is recommended in the OpenSUSE wiki and just does it automagically. Both worked to create a bootable installer USB. The only problem I had with the installer was having to set nomodeset, everything else it did a good job with. Unless you count the part where it didn’t make my system bootable.
It is EFI and I have stuck with using Grub2-EFI in the few recent attempts I’ve made. Secure boot is disabled in the BIOS and UEFI enabled. In my attempts with Grub2-EFI, I’ve tried with both secure boot option on and off. When I get into the system I can see it installs the shim so that is a moot point, I’m leaving secure boot off and unticking the option to support it when I select my boot loader. In fact it looks (to my eye) like all the necessary files are there in /boot/efi.
I suppose I can download the ISO again to my install and cp it to the USB device to see if that makes any difference. It seems unlikely to me that 4 different images all install poorly even though they checksum right.
Are there any modules I should load in the expert section of the installer that might help? I looked around but didn’t see anything that wasn’t already loaded specific to my system.
nomodeset has to do with you video card not the install in itself. ie the default open source driver would not work with your particular card This generally means you must install a propritary driver once the install is done. Try booting to recovery mode it will be an advanced option on the boot menu
Just to be clear you do a get a boot menu then maybe another screen then black??
We can’t see over your shoulder so you have to tell us what you see
So far you just told us its broken not where and how it is broken. Since you needed to use nomodeset at boot on the install you could try that again that will use old very reliable but not so great drivers that should work with any hardware. If you need help with the video drivers please tell us what card/chip you have.
I might be throwing you off by mentioning the nomodeset thing. That was just because the driver on the OpenSUSE installer wouldn’t work with my Intel HD graphics chip.
When booting from the USB into the installer, I get the grub menu as expected for Installation/Rescue System/Check Installation Media, it is here I have to use nomodeset otherwise I get a black screen. When booting from the HDD with no USB installed, I get nothing but the no bootable device, insert bootable media message from the system.
To get into my installation on /dev/sda, I have to boot from the USB, go to Check Installation Media (e, nomodeset), Start Installation, Boot Installed System. Then I can select my root device just fine. The install itself is fully updated and works flawlessly.
So for the where it’s broken, when I boot from the HDD it doesn’t even get to grub so I must assume that it doesn’t see my device as bootable for some reason.