First,
Attempted to upgrade a 13.1 to 42.1.
Of course, 13.1 was installed with MBR.
First oddity I found although the network device is identified properly during hardware detection, the NIC isn’t configured and working during install
(RTL8168, BCM4352)
Resulted in a failure, unable to boot. Looks like the boot partition isn’t being found.
Looking at Install options, it seems that 42.1 is insisting on GPT and may not support MBR… unless I’m missing something.
Thinking the problem might have been related to the upgrade rather than new install, decided to wipe out the previous install and tried to install 42.1 new.
Same result.
So, I wonder if this is a 42.1 bug. Am reluctant to enable secure boot in the BIOS, I personally feel suspicious about it.
Can anyone verify that 42.1 intentionally does not support MBR and insists on GPT?
If what I’m seeing is true, then it means that 42.1 requires GPT so older BIOS may be an important incompatibility issue.
And, of course no choice if the BIOS supports both GPT and MBR, you must choose GPT.
Has the disk been used before with gpt? If so I have found in the past needing to use wipefs -a /dev/sdX (This is a destructive wipe!!) to clear out cruft, or if you run gdisk and x and z to zap it back to mbr/dos.
It would be more useful if you simply described actual problems during boot instead of presenting your conclusions which are based on either misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Without knowing actual errors you see during boot it is impossible to help you.
Installed Leap 42.1 M2 here too on MBR following defaults (other than saving the existing /home).
“XP” class machine, small 63 x 512 bit sectors so bootloader installed to /root partition.
No problems booting out of the box.
Yeah,
I’ll download again to get 42.1 m2.
Was just surprised to see what I was seeing.
Problem is as described… Once files are written to disk, then the system reboots for first time but unable to find an OS, so it seems to be a problem just finding the bootloader partition and/or files.
After initially running into this attempting the upgrade,
Then decided to wipe out the root partition and install new, accepting defaults except for the bootloader configuration(uncheck box for secure boot) because the system BIOS is set to “legacy, non-efi”
Same error.
The same install media has been used to successfully install a few VMware VMs.
I think that’s only an issue if you boot the installer in UEFI mode. In that case, it defaults to using grub2-efi for booting.
If you want to use legacy booting, then you should boot the installer in legacy mode. It then defaults to using grub2 (the MBR implementation) for booting.
If you booted the installer in UEFI mode, that would also explain why it wanted to use GPT partitioning.
As I described,
The BIOS has been set to non-secure, “legacy” MBR mode.
But, everything I’ve seen both during the installation and the result suggests that <only> efi is supported.
That was all in 42.1 m1.
Now that I have 42.1 m2 downloaded, I’ll try again within the next couple days (of course, since the old system has been wiped out, this is no longer an upgrade but a new install).