I recently tried out a live version of Chrome OS Flex. It was suggested in another thread that I may have done zypper dup while the Chrome usb drive was plugged in. Whatever the reason, since trying Chrome OS Flex, grub got broken. It shows Chrome as a boot option, which doesn’t work.
The real problem I am trying to solve is to get Tumbleweed to boot again. When selecting it from the grub menu, it goes into recovery mode. One problem is that it keeps searching for sdc which had Chrome on it and is not plugged in. In another thread that related to boot problems, solutions were suggested which I could not get to work. I gave up and tried a reinstall. My pc originally had a hd with Windows installed. I later added Tumbleweed with no problems and used it as my primary solution. I later added an ssd with Windows. Using the same process, I installed Tumbleweed alongside of Windows, making the ssd as my primary system with the hd as a backup in case of failure It is the hd version that fails to boot as described above.
Being old, stupid and careless, I reinstalled Tumbleweed on the ssd, which had been working anyway! I thought I selected options that would have preserved the Windows install and the Tumbleweed data. I didn’t. Everything was wiped. When I use Dolphin, I don’t see the hd anymore. I used to be able to select and mount it. So, I wiped a working OS and am still stuck with a non-booting hd, or rather, one that boots only into maintenance mode. I can’t accomplish anything in maintenance mode, partly out of ignorance, partly because only the reboot command works.
My plan now is to disconnect the ssd to be sure I don’t make a mistake again and do a reinstall on the hd. I want to preserve the Windows install and linux data if possible. Even if that succeeds, I want to have a grub menu that includes Tumbleweed and Windows from both drive; and no entry for Chrome OS Flex. How do I do this?
You should had asked about your problem when you encountered the first one.
Someone could have help you to not made another problem.
The first one I think as a guess is just an fstab issue but now it became complicated.
Key is to use the expert partitioner, beginning with existing partitions, and designating those to be mounted as-is, which to be reused and formatted, which to delete, how big to make a new one out of freespace, etc. It’s your PC. You make the decisions. Without you providing here output from fdisk -l, parted -l and/or lsblk -f for the state in which you wish to begin installing, we have no basis on which to make specific suggestions.
Getting out of recovery mode is often a matter of finding a UUID the system thinks is needed but is not, such as for a swap partition that got reformatted during the most recent installation attempt. Working around that is done simply by removing the resume= parameter from the linu line in Grub, replacing it with noresume. If it’s not a swap UUID, find out what doesn’t match anything that’s available, and get it out of fstab. If that’s too much trouble, add nofail parameters to fstab entries that are not necessary for booting. e.g., if booting from sda somewhere, remove or nofail all entries for filesystems on sdb, sdc, sdd, etc. Or instead of nofail, use a bigger hammer: noauto.
I don’t know if there is anything here that tells you, but sda is the hd and sdb is the ssd.
When in the maintenance mode, the monitor (old flat screen tv) has the wrong resolution and the beginning of each line is cut off. So, I cannot be sure what each line of text is saying. I can get a command prompt by entering root’s password. But, once there, I don’t know what to do. I’ve tried startx but that fails. From grub, I can boot into TW or Windows, which from viewing the commands you pointed out, are alone on separate disks. That may be all I can expect now. Am I wrong in thinking that at one time, Dolphin would let me access disks other than the one running at the time? I.E. look at sda from sdb and vice-versa.
All of this because I wanted to look at Chrome OS Flex. In the past, I’ve looked at Mint, Tails, Kali and others with no problems. I look at these things but only run Tumbleweed, and a Windows install only for things that won’t run on opensuse.
In TW Grub menu, is it all alone, or is there another TW and/or Windows to choose from?
From the sdb/SSD partitioning output, it looks like your first installation was Windows in UEFI mode, next installation TW in UEFI mode, last installation TW in legacy/BIOS mode, which is probably what you’ve been booting most recently. Can you use your BBS boot hotkey to choose Windows or openSUSE in UEFI mode?
I have pics of the grub screens if useful. The menu offers the standard boot line for TW at the top of the menu. It also offers sdb2, sdb3 and sdb6 to boot. None of those work. They go into maintenance mode. My working install of TW is kernel 5.18 while the other installs are on 5.16 kernel. Legacy boot tries to go to one of these failed versions. UEFI boot works for both Windows and TW.
While I thought I had a dual boot setup in each disk, it appears that sda is Windows and sdb has TW only on it. It might be useful to save my home partition on sdb, I guess I could blow it all out and have a fresh install of TW on the ssd which is sdb. Is there a way to save the home partition but do a fresh install of everything else? Mrmazda has posted that more info was needed to make this decision. Is this enough info or is there more I should gather and post?
Sure. Your /home is already a separate partition formatted XFS. You could consider it a backup if nothing else. It’s only 65G, which doesn’t seem like an ideal size for a 500G SSD. You could remove all the other partitions on sdb, make a new one at a more suitable size, format it EXT4 or BTRFS, move the content from the current sdb8 to it, remove sdb8, then start a new installation. Or you could leave sdb8 alone for now, create a new installation in the space used by the others, including a new /home, then move the content from sdb8 later on. I remember at least one mailing list thread not too long ago discussing removal of XFS support, but not whether or not it was a done deal, or whether it was applicable to Leap and/or TW, or if Leap, which version.
That is the actual order of your partitions.
I would suggest that you can probably delete 5, 6, 7, 8
And expand 3 in to their space
Use and set sda1 as your active efi partiition during installation
But you need to consider carefully if my assessment is correct
UEFI installation is easiest with only one drive being attached. Interaction between systems is minimal: Each of the drives will have their EFI System Partition. Tumbleweed on host erlangen has this partitioning:
At this point, I want to leave sda alone so I have a working Windows install, at least temporarily, since my hardware is not suitable for Windows 11. Taking note of your caution, I examined the contents of sdb via Dolphin. The partitions were displayed out of order. Here is how they were listed:
sdb8 - 67.4 GB - has a Download folder with content (all of which I can load up to the cloud) and all other folders (Documents, Music Video etc.) are empty of content
sdb2 - 164.4 GB - has old config files referencing an older kernel (5.16 and 5.15) but home is empty
sdb7 - 48.7 GB is a duplicate of sdb8
sdb6 - 73.1 GB - has old config files like sdb2 and home is likewise empty of any Documents etc
sdb3 - 109.6 GB is like sdb2 and sdb6
So, sdb7 and 8 are the only partitions worth saving as far as I’m concerned. Since they are duplicates of each other, really only one is needed. It seems to me that I should just reinstall letting the installer do what ever it wants with sdb (meaning the ssd) and get a clean, organized disk. I’m sure I have this mess, at least in part, because I made the wrong partitioning choices during install. To get a clean, organized install, what choice should I make during partitioning?
[ul][li]Plan 1:[ol][]Ensure you have a restorable backup of sdb8 aka /home.
[/li][li]Delete all except ESP, swap & /home from a live Linux boot that can run GParted.
[/li][li]Decide how big you want /home (and thus /) to be.
[/li][li]Subtract current size from new size to be.
[/li][li]Move the current /home toward front of disk by the difference in sizes just calculated.
[/li][li]Create new / using the entire space between /home and ESP.
[/li][li]Delete the /home partition.
[/li][li]Create new /home partition using the entire freespace between / and swap.
[/li][li]Boot the TW installation media in UEFI mode.
[/li][li]In partitioning step, use expert with existing partitions, formatting only /.
[/li][li]After you have booted the newly installed TW, use the xfs_growfs command to make the /home filesystem use the entire partition.[/ul]
[/li][li]Plan 2:[list=1][]Ensure you have a restorable backup of sdb8 aka /home.
[/li][li]Delete all except ESP, swap & /home from a live Linux boot that can run GParted.
[/li][li]Decide how big you want /home and / to be.
[/li][li]Create / partition at end of ESP partition.
[/li][li]Move the current /home all the way up to the end of /.
[/li][li]Delete the /home partition.
[/li][li]Create new /home partition using the entire freespace between / and swap, or less, if you wish to reserve some space for other things some other day, such as a / for another distro. Be sure the new size is as large or larger than the original XFS size.
[/li][li]Boot the TW installation media in UEFI mode.
[/li][li]In partitioning step, use expert with existing partitions, formatting only /.
[/li][li]After you have booted the newly installed TW, use the xfs_growfs command to make the /home filesystem use the entire partition.[/ol]
[/li][]Plan 3:[ul][]Ensure you have a restorable backup of sdb8 aka /home.[]Have TW installer use entire disk.[]After installation is complete and booted, restore /home from your backup.[/ul][/list]Many more plans are possible.
I chickened out, mrmazda. So, I went to plan 3. I was afraid I would mess up a step and botch another install. For example, I was only guessing what ESP was. I didn’t have a clue as to optimal (or even reasonable) partition sizes, and moving them was daunting.
The reinstall went well but I have a few setup things to do to get it back the way I want it. Wish I could find the wallpapers etc that I had previously. Having only the necessary partitions seems to have speeded up the boot and the shutdown. Thank you for your advice.