Hey guys, I just made the stupid decision to update to Windows 8.1 today, and after doing so I found out that Windows overtook openSUSE’s priority on UEFI booting, causing my laptop to boot into Windows by default instead of GRUB. So I put GRUB back to where it was in the UEFI booting menu, and it shows up, however, when I attempt to boot into openSUSE, it stops into Emergency Mode.
I checked my partitions using a LiveUSB and gParted and found out that all of them are still fine, so I supposed that the problem lies only within UEFI and GRUB. The problem is, I don’t really have a clear idea on how to fix the problem. I’ve searched around and found some vague solutions outlining that YaST in a LiveUSB has an option to fix GRUB, though I can’t find any more details on this. I’m also looking at using boot-repair, although I don’t think it will be able to get GRUB back to how it worked after my install of openSUSE.
Does anybody have any suggestions on how I should fix this problem, hopefully from tools included in an openSUSE Live CD/DVD/USB? Right now I’m stuck not being able to do work since I’m not able to boot into openSUSE. Thanks in advance.
So I am not seeing any other help here. Do consider you can reload openSUSE, using uefi openSUSE Disk boot option from your PC setup. Select custom partition, reuse all openSUSE partitions and only format the root / partition. That should get you back to where you were before the Windows 8.1 update.
As for updating from Windows 8.0 to 8.1, you need to put Windows back in as the default boot from your PC setup. Select its uefi partition as default boot for instance or, if installed on a separate hard disk, make it the default boot disk in PC setup. If sharing the same MBR boot disk, make sure the MBR is generic boot code and use GPARTED to set the Windows partition as the active booting partition. Make sure you created a LiveDVD or thumb drive in order to use GPARTED to put the openSUSE root partition back as the default boot for that hard disk.
In general do not install Grub into the MBR else Windows 8.1 will not install or it will remove grub for you, thus making sure you must reinstall Grub. You must be online to the internet and logged into Windows 8.0 with a Microsoft Account. A local account will not provide the update option. You will find the 8.1 option, if all is right, in the store as the first option you can select.
>
> Hey guys, I just made the stupid decision to update to Windows 8.1
> today, and after doing so I found out that Windows overtook openSUSE’s
> priority on UEFI booting, causing my laptop to boot into Windows by
> default instead of GRUB. So I put GRUB back to where it was in the UEFI
> booting menu, and it shows up, however, when I attempt to boot into
> openSUSE, it stops into Emergency Mode.
>
Same general result here - but much more of a mess as I lost all access to
the previous grub.
> I checked my partitions using a LiveUSB and gParted and found out that
> all of them are still fine, so I supposed that the problem lies only
> within UEFI and GRUB. The problem is, I don’t really have a clear idea
> on how to fix the problem. I’ve searched around and found some vague
> solutions outlining that YaST in a LiveUSB has an option to fix GRUB,
> though I can’t find any more details on this. I’m also looking at using
> boot-repair, although I don’t think it will be able to get GRUB back to
> how it worked after my install of openSUSE.
>
I made the mistake of shrinking the W8 partition just a tad too much when I
first set this box up. After carefully shrinking the installed systems, I
moved them all to the end of the drive to get out of the way of expanding
the W8 partition. Everything was booting fine after the shrink/move
goatrope. Did the 3.5Gb download for MS and ran the update (3.5 Gb and NO
ISO???) and spent a bunch of time trying to recover the UEFI boot but the
update process had snuck in a hidden recovery partition and nothing was
coming together.
> Does anybody have any suggestions on how I should fix this problem,
> hopefully from tools included in an openSUSE Live CD/DVD/USB? Right now
> I’m stuck not being able to do work since I’m not able to boot into
> openSUSE. Thanks in advance.
>
My solution was a bit of a brute force attack. I keep a second copy of the
running openSUSE on the disk (gotta love terrabyte drives!) so I went ahead
and installed the 13.1 RC1 I had been intending to install anyway over the
backup. That cleaned things up nicely and got the whole thing running
again. I haven’t had time to boot W8.1 since getting the rest back up, so
there may be some gotchas looming, but that 13.1 install was by far the
quickest way to clean up the boot problems I had!
So far updated 3 dual boot PC’s to Windows 8.1 with no issues. Two had Windows on a seperate Hard Disk (recommended when you can) and one used a single (MBR formatted) SSD drive.
> So far updated 3 dual boot PC’s to Windows 8.1 with no issues. Two had
> Windows on a seperate Hard Disk (recommended when you can) and one used
> a single (MBR formatted) SSD drive.
>
The UEFI implementation - or Windows - on this HP Envy h8 box (6-8 months
old) precludes a GPT/MBR mix of disks. I can’t get the OEM-supplied Win8 to
even show up if I have an MBR disk plugged in. As you have pointed out
several times, a lot depends on the UEFI implmentaion. This one basically
rules out secure boot if an MBR disk is attached to the SATA buss. It has
no issue with an MBR formatted USB drive, though. Again, the HP
implementation of UEFI is highly suspect.
I suspect a major part of my problems actually came from having to clear up
the space on the disk to allow me to expand the Win partition which I made
too darned small in the first place. That forced Win to go through some
gyrations to handle the change in configuration so it likely rewrote the EFI
partition as it was adding the “recovery” partition. In the end, the update
wiped out the EFI entries for openSUSE and the simplest (and the quickest)
fix was to simply install a small test copy of 13.1. That rebuilt the EFI
setup and I was off and running. That’s one more reason for having a test
installation on hand.
BTW, when I went back into the bootloader setup for the main 12.3
installation, it did not find the 13.1 installation so that was not on the
boot menu offered by 12.3. Now, that puzzles me a bit. I’m setting up a
couple more test sequences to see if I see any pattern here, FWIW.
So I should just go ahead and reinstall openSUSE? That sounds a little too drastic. Wouldn’t it be easier to just reinstall GRUB? I was just hoping that there was a way to do that from the openSUSE Live Disk.
Oh, and if it helps, my / (root) partition is not in the same HDD as my /home, /var, and Windows partitions. My laptop has a “hybrid” drive, meaning there’s a large HDD and a small SSD used for caching which I repurposed. Could my weird partitioning scheme have been the problem?
I made the mistake of shrinking the W8 partition just a tad too much when I
first set this box up. After carefully shrinking the installed systems, I
moved them all to the end of the drive to get out of the way of expanding
the W8 partition. Everything was booting fine after the shrink/move
goatrope. Did the 3.5Gb download for MS and ran the update (3.5 Gb and NO
ISO???) and spent a bunch of time trying to recover the UEFI boot but the
update process had snuck in a hidden recovery partition and nothing was
coming together.
I have noticed that recovery partition as well, though I decided not to move it or mess with it since it could probably help me when Windows 8 inevitably implodes on itself as I was not provided a physical recovery disk (it’s all the rage these days). It was a 20GB partition sitting on the end of my drive. Looking at my partitions again my /home partition is safe (only partition that matters anyway), and the closest partition to the Win recovery partition was my swap.
What version of openSUSE do you have to start with?
If it boots as far as emergency mode you just need to find out why. The only reason it can land in emergency mode is when it fails to mount filesystem. So you just have to find out which one, temporary comment it out from /etc/fstab.
Did you, by any chance, use “btrfs” for the root file system on 13.1? If yes, then this is bug 845589. You can still boot 13.1 that way by adding a suitable entry to “/etc/grub.d/40_custom”.
> I have noticed that recovery partition as well, though I decided not to
> move it or mess with it since it could probably help me when Windows 8
> inevitably implodes on itself as I was not provided a physical recovery
> disk (it’s all the rage these days). It was a 20GB partition sitting on
> the end of my drive. Looking at my partitions again my /home partition
> is safe (only partition that matters anyway), and the closest partition
> to the Win recovery partition was my swap.
>
Somewhere I ran across an admin function that deleted all but the 2 most
recent of those hidden partitions. Can’t recall how I got to it - I’m doing
good to find the power button on W8 - and now I’m nervous aboput using it
even if I could find it again.
>
> Will Honea;2592361 Wrote:
>> BTW, when I went back into the bootloader setup for the main 12.3
>> installation, it did not find the 13.1 installation so that was not on
>> the
>> boot menu offered by 12.3. Now, that puzzles me a bit. I’m setting up
>> a
>> couple more test sequences to see if I see any pattern here, FWIW.
>
> Did you, by any chance, use “btrfs” for the root file system on 13.1?
> If yes, then this is bug 845589. You can still boot 13.1 that way by
> adding a suitable entry to “/etc/grub.d/40_custom”.
>
No, I stuck with ext4 for the file system. In the process, I also updated
another 12.3 installation using the RC1 DVD. That one left me without the
“openSUSE Secure Boot” entry and the plain “openSUSE” entry got me to an
error re: no kernel to load. Turns out, best I can tell, that the DVD that
gave me a bootable system was a full out install using the 32-bit version of
13.1 beta and I still don’t have a bootable 13.1 x86_64 installation.
I’ve seen posts about the issue I’m having so I just need to search some
prior posts in this group to get that straight but it’s still a challenge.