Hello, I am hoping for some help and guidance from a wizard! In the past I have installed various versions of open suse on my laptop without problems but with 12.2 I encountered a real problem. First, it wanted to erase my windows parti tion (no go with that) I then had the idea of installing 12.2 on a usb drive, so I loaded the 12.2 disc into my other laptop, set the destination for 12.2 as the usb drive. No problems with that until I realised that to boot into 12.2 the usb drive would have to be attached to that laptop, because the grub 2 bootloader was installed on that machine’s hard drive, so this is my question, can I install the grub 2 bootloader onto the proper laptop, the one I am using now? otherwise I cannot use the 12.2 installation which is resident on the usb hard drive. Hope some clever person can help or if not, suggest a way I can dualboot 12.2 with my small Windows partition, without 12.2 formatting my windows section. I am running a Medion laptop 8 gig ram 1 terabyte hard drive with just Windows 7 home premium installed.
Many thanks if anyone can help, I really like open suse 12.2, let’s hope I can still use it.
You have at least three different problems there, so lets look at them one at a time. If you have a openSUSE copy running on any computer, you can use it to create a bootable USB drive. Basically you download a LiveCD iso image and copy it to a USB drive where it works just as before, but boot from a USB drive instead. Here is the bash script, intended to be run from openSUSE to download a LiveCD image and copy it to a USB thumb drive in the proper manner.
When you install openSUSE 12.2, it indeed will install the new Grub 2 by default. Normally, Grub 2 will load onto the primary boot drive, no matter were you send the rest of openSUSE. You must on purpose elect to copy all of openSUISE, through the booting section, to any drive other than your main boot drive.
And, when you install openSUSE, there must be room (free disk space) somewhere for it to reside. Further, there is a basic problem if you already have four primary partitions that exist on your disk. If there is no room, no extended partition with room, then indeed, something must go to install openSUSE. If all of the rooms in your house are full, where is any new guest going to live? We would need to know a lot more about the original hard drive where you hoped to install openSUSE. How many partitions does it have? How many are primary partitions? From where was the free disk space to come from to install openSUSE? And, openSUSE can not be installed in a FAT or NTFS partition as those are not supported. You can have and use FAT and NTFS partitions, but the root and /home partitions are not supported in anything but Linux partitions types such as EXT4.
Reinstall on the USB stick, but take care that GRUB is also installed on the USB stick, not on the laptop’s internal disk, like you did now.
But, installing on the laptop where already an openSUSE install resides, allows you to pick “Import paritions”. That will import your openSUSE partitioning, format only the parition that’s mounted on “/”, and leave the rest untouched.
thank you all for your help, when I read my post again, I thought of the obvious answer!! I placed the disc in my disc tray,started the installation process and pointed to the usb hard drive as the target drive. I am now running 12.2 on the usb drive as I speak. Many thanks for all your help, very much appreciated.