I have FreeBSD on my machine so I chose grub on boot partition however my boot manager on MBR (gag) was wipped and MBR became clean (nothing to boot). I do checked my settings before confirmed the installation. Did anybody has same problem?
I had a couple of trial runs installing to virtualbox, and I didn’t find the bootloader options to be very clear at all.
I really prefer installers that put the bootloader options ‘in your face’, instead of trying to sneak them past, but I guess some installer design committee at openSUSE thinks otherwise.
Aside from that, the choice of wording for the various options made things more ambiguous than they needed to be. For a bootloader installation, that is very dangerous because if you guess wrong, bam! your system is unbootable – unless you have a good backup boot method (read on), or you want to essay some repairs from a live cd.
At any rate I was able to guess correctly to 1. write a new mbr (essentially the defaults), and 2. to write grub to the root ("/") of the new installation without writing an mbr, so I could test out chainloading it from another grub (in this case on a virtual floppy disk).
Here is some very good info about grub so you can boot even without a working mbr: Grub Grotto. It’s always a good idea to have an optional boot disk with grub on it; a floppy is ideal but if you don’t have a fdd, a usb stick or even a cdr might do.
Before I install to hdd for real, I am going to backup the mbr and partition table to a floppy disk using the “dd” command from a live cd (google for explicit instructions on how to do this).
The last time I installed openSUSE (about 6-months ago), it hosed an existing fedora installation in an adjacent partition (which I was luckily able to restore fairly easily, using a recent partimage backup). That was the only time I’ve seen one distro take out another during an installation.
This release is looking pretty polished, apart from the bootloader faux pas, so I’m hoping that will not be repeated.