Beta2 unable to boot after installation

Disclaimer: I’m a *nix noob. Apologies in advance.

On my ThinkPad X200 (HW info), I’ve been testing OpenSuse 10.3, then 11.0, and now 11.1 Beta-2. This problem is new to 11.1.

I’m installing from the KDE4 LiveCD (MD5 confirmed OK). During the live session there is no problem, all HW configured OK. Installation completes successfully, and after shut-down, remove-CD, and power-on, the system reports “no bootable device”, when using BIOS to try to force boot to HDD, will see the error message, “no active partitions found”.

I’ve tried re-install multiple times always using full format. I’ve tried all partition based and LVM based configurations. I’ve tried configuring GRUB with boot from MBR and also by creating custom boot partition.

Still no dice.

(Also, immediately after confirming options to install, Yast2 pops up an error message that it is unable to create a repository for the install CD since there is no valid metadata found)

Still not bootable.

I’m guessing there is some magic games I could play with Grub to config to get it working, but I’m not clever enough to figure it out.

(Already tried these steps, no luck):
find /boot/grub/stage1 —> hd0,1
root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0)

It runs the installation, and becomes sort of bootable, but just dies during boot giving me an error that it could not find:
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-1ATA_xxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxx-part2
and asks if I want to fall back to /dev/sda2

When I respond yes, it continues with booting, and proceeds into the secondary installation.

Confirmed: just ran a reinstall of the 11.0 KDE4 live CD, installed no problem, HDD was bootable following the installation.

It is a known problem with the live cd’s, just throw them away, and wait for the next release, hopefully things will be working by then.

It’s too bad, I was really hoping to get a tip to get this beta working for me, and on an off-chance contribute something helpful to the beta program.

I suppose it’s reasonable to understand that the beta program really isn’t intended for people at my level.

I’ll just sit back and wait for the next release, and hope for the best.