I have an older laptop well within the spec’s to run 11.1. Unfortunately, the secondary ide controller is starting to flake out, and won’t let me boot from it anymore. It is also old enough that I can’t boot from USB.
I’ve encountered similiar problems putting linux on laptops, and what has always worked was to put the drive in a different computer and start the install there. Then, put the drive back in the laptop and finish up.
Now I notice when doing the partitioning, there’s a way to set how the drive is identified (not up to date on this stuff). However, every one I set gives the “Waiting for /dev/disk/by-id/<blah-blah>” message when it gets back in the laptop. (Sorry, verbage may be a wrong, laptop isn’t in front of me right now).
Is there a way to get opensuse installed?
I guess you could always create and set the partitions by it’s name and not device id? There is always such option when creating partition.
Side note: there is yet another place to set how the disk to be referenced by device name or path name or kernel or whatever it is. Double click on the partition and there’s an extra button for this… This doesn’t appear to be the problem.
So, after some digging, the computer I installed on has a significantly different chipset than the laptop. The install computer, and the disk’s initrd use the piix module, and I think the laptop needs the sis module.
Since the install media knows how to do this, is there a way to do this manually? (ie. after the “waiting for device…” “not found” stuff) My initrd-fu is a bit rusty, but I suspect if I can get the laptop to boot, I can do a proper mkinitrd.
Try to set sis in the initrd_modules in YaST and reinstall kernel.
How big is the hard drive?
if you could spare a 4.5Gb partition you could put the install iso there and install from hard drive.
Installation without CD - openSUSE
http://en.opensuse.org/Installation_without_CD#Internet.2FNetwork_install_using_GRUB.2FLILO
http://www.supergrubdisk.org/
just partition the drive in your other machine. Make it bootable and make grub point to the installer.
More info in case someone searching comes across this thread.
What I ended up doing was extract initrd, add ata_sis, rebuild initrd with a different name, and then added a grub menu item using the new initrd. With the drive back in the laptop, I just insmod’ed in the correct module (after the “Waiting for…” “not found” stuff), and it came up.
Now, this isn’t the best (or maybe even the right) way to do this. In the middle of this, I noticed I could tell mkinitrd what modules to include (in /etc/sysconfig/kernel) or even have initrd loaded up with all kinds of modules (check the manpage).
I still needed to change /etc/sysconfig/kernel and rerun mkinitrd once the install was working in the laptop. I was a bit paranoid about not being able to boot on the other computer, which is why I went with an alternate initrd.
Anyways, thanks to whoever put the readme in /boot, which got me thinking about this.
Ultimately, I’m thinking the post above from tom_enos is both the best and right way to do it.