hi. as a long time microsoft user I have wodered what Linux might be like so I downloaded opensuse leap 15.4 and burnt an image dvd. It was my intention to dual boot (actually triple boot) as I am currently doing with Win 7 & Win XP. I have a 3 terabyte sata drive installed partitioned into 3 1terabyte partitions, 1 for win7, one for XP and the remaining 1 terabyte partition unallocated. this is where I installed leap. All appeared to go well until the install reached the restart phase. the grub started but reported no btrfs filesystem found on any of the modos hd0 partitions. I finally gave up and wiped out the installation, booted from the Win7 disc and used command prompt to rebuild MBR and can now at least boot the machine as before. I am still interested in learning about Linux. Anyone have a clue what might have gone wrong???
I need to goto bed now, but I’ll give a short clue now and come back later:
Trying to use all of a 3TB HDD with XP included
I could be wrong, but I suspect XP can only be booted from either an MBR disk, or in a VM. Full use of a 3TB disk needs a GPT partition table, unless you are a highly experienced partitioner and multiboot user.
Max disk size that can be addressed by MBR and BIOS is 2TB. If your partition (or files on it) is beyond this limit, grub cannot access them. grub was apparently installed in MBR.
Changing partition table to GPT will not help as you still have BIOS limit (besides making Windows unusable).
Your only option is to have separate partition below 2TB for /boot (this will disable snapper rollback option). Once kernel is booted it can access full disk size.
well, I gave up on the dual boot thing. An old machine I had around had a 80 gig drive I could free up and I installed Leap there as a single boot. So, now I have a Linux machine to try out. We’ll see how it goes. At first glance KDE seems much more cumbersome to use than Windows but that could be just getting to know something new. It’s been a lot of years since I had to work with a command line interface so that will take some time also. My last experience like that was a college class writing Pascal code on an Emacs editor and using a C compiler to run them so that should give you an idea of just aout how many years ago that was, LOL. Thanks for the suggestions tho, I really appreciate the response!