Failed OS install or operator error

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hello to all. I’ve just installed OpenSuse 13 on my multi-boot desktop. The install appears to have gone well up until the point where the installer is attempting to configure the boot loader. At this point it hangs, for a very long time.

With OpenSuse the installation took about 2 hours. In my experience this is an extremely long time. Most unusual. Anyhow, after waiting patiently for the install to finish setting up the boot loader I finally caved and pressed the reset button. I had simply run out of patience. I know how to rescue my system so no big deal.

During the installation question and answer session I was careful to select the root partition, /dev/sdb17 (yes, you read right) for OpenSuse’s boot loader. I am a Fedora user and I wanted Fedora’s GRUB2 to continue handling booting of all installed OS’s. Apparently this selection was ignored. When I pressed reset and the system came back up grub was hosed. I fixed that and got my boot loader back.

Now that my system was restored to working condition it was time to see if I could get OpenSuse to boot. Fedora’s grub2-mkconfig added an entry for OpenSuse so I rebooted and booted OpenSuse. The system booted without issue but I can’t log in. This is where my dilemma starts. Apparently there are no users on this OpenSuse system even though I created a regular user and a separate root user during the question and answer pre-install session.

I remember creating a user “glenn” with my usual home password and a separate root user. I don’t remember if I was asked at that point to create a root password.

I really don’t want to reinstall OpenSuse.

Is there any way for me to create a user now?
Can I run a post-install “firstboot” type of script?
Could I chroot into OpenSuse from Fedora and do some sort of configuration?
Is this something that is not uncommon with OpenSuse installations?

Hope I’m fairly coherent. Had a few too may beers tonight :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for your consideration. I hope to be checking out a working OpenSuse system soon!

2

I suppose you don’t have a floppy drive, right?
Your BIOS apparently tells the kernel that you have one, so the installer tries to access it and that can take a long time when there is none.
This behavior has been fixed in the kernel recently, so should not happen any more with 13.2 though.

So, if you disable the (non-existent) floppy drive in the BIOS settings, the installation should work normally.

With OpenSuse the installation took about 2 hours. In my experience this is an extremely long time. Most unusual. Anyhow, after waiting patiently for the install to finish setting up the boot loader I finally caved and pressed the reset button. I had simply run out of patience. I know how to rescue my system so no big deal.

Well, that was a mistake. You did not create a user yet.
The user creation and other important system configurations are done after the installation, you missed that by aborting.

I suppose the best thing is to just re-install.

You could of course try to login as root (the password should be the same as your user’s) and create a new user, but you probably would have to set up other stuff as well, like the network.
I’m not at all sure what’s missing in this state. But I guess it would be possible to do.

You could try to create a file /var/lib/YaST2/runme_at_boot and/or /var/lib/YaST2/reconfig_system (with touch), then the second installation stage should be run at the next boot and maybe setup your system properly including the user.
But I never had such a problem, so I’m not at all sure that that helps.

If not you could try to add a user in yast->Security and Users->User and Group Management, and then maybe setup other things in YaST, but I have no idea what would be necessary.

If you cannot login as root, add “init=/bin/sh” to the boot option, you should get to a minimal text mode system with root rights then without having to enter a password. Change the root password there (with “passwd”) and reboot, you should then be able to login as root at least.

3

Hello Wolfi323! Thanks for taking the time to reply!

I took your advice and booted with the init=/bin/sh parameter and was able to set the root password. You were correct, there was no user “glenn” created so I also took the opportunity to do that at the same time.

Now I can log in to the Gnome desktop as root, however, I am having difficulty logging in as “glenn”. I keep getting booted back to the log in screen.

4

Can you log in to a different desktop environment/window manager?
You should be able to select one at the login screen, at least IceWM should be installed by default.

Sounds like a permissions issue, might be related to direct rendering, which GNOME absolutely requires.

5

I was able to log into IceWM, however, the menu system there didn’t work. I couldn’t select anything, including logging back out.

Let’s not waste any more of your or my time here. This was clearly a failed installation, be it operator error or some quirk with the OpenSuse installer. Who knows? I’ve done hundreds of Linux installs. Fedora, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, etc., usually in a multi-boot setting. Rarley do I have issues of this magnitude. Something went wrong during the “post install” portion of the installation and configs were not written to disk. Maybe the installer has issues with a system with so many partitions? Maybe I had too many beers before deciding to give OpenSuse another shot? Could have been the weather. No matter the reason I just don’t want to fight with this OS at this level right now.

I’ve been toying with the idea of wiping my disk and starting clean for some time now. Something to do. If I do, I’ll try OpenSuse again, this time installing to /dev/sdb3 or 5 or 6 and see what happens. I’ll likely also allow it to overwrite the boot loader. I can always recover the Fedora loader if desired.

Thank you so much for your help wolfi323. It is greatly appreciated :slight_smile:

6

No, I already told you the most likely reason.
The bootloader installation tries to access the floppy driver, and this causes huge timeouts when there is none (it might take hours to complete).
At this point you aborted the installation by pressing the reset button, but most configuration including the creation of users is done afterwards.

7

As far as I can tell everything in the BIOS concerning floppy disks is disabled.

Three installation failures so far.

Mind pointing me to a thread or two or a bugzilla on this OpenSuse / floppy issue?

8

Hm. Then try adding “brokenmodules=floppy” to the installation disk’s boot options.

If that doesn’t help either, it must have a different cause.

You could switch to a different console (Ctrl+Alt+F1 or F2 f.e.) when the hang occurs and have a look into the kernel log whether there’s some clue what’s happening.

dmesg|tail

Mind pointing me to a thread or two or a bugzilla on this OpenSuse / floppy issue?

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=773058

9

Hi wolfi323. Thanks for sticking with me.

I seem to have a working system now. Before I read your latest reply I went ahead and installed again. I let the thing run for a long long time and then finally killed it. Same issue with configuring grub. Anyhow, this time, upon reboot the setup/configuration script ran automatically. When I was able to log into the desktop I noted that everything appeared to be in order. I’ve been tweaking since.

If I happen to install OpenSuse again I’ll surely try brokenmodules=floppy.

Thanks again. Off to see if Cinnamon is available to release 13.

10

Good to hear.

If I happen to install OpenSuse again I’ll surely try brokenmodules=floppy.

I hope you should not need it any more, because that should be fixed in 13.2 as mentioned. :wink:

Thanks again. Off to see if Cinnamon is available to release 13.

It’s not included in the distribution, but packages are available for 13.1.

See here for how to install them:
http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Cinnamon