I have Ubuntu 20.04 on one drive, Debian 10 on another drive, and just installed a HDD in my laptop, I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on the new HDD, but can’t get GRUB to recognize or detect it. Am I installing it wrong? I haven’t been able to access or use openSUSE Tumbleweed either.
The problem isn’t the disk drive, because the Ubuntu and Debian systems recognize the new drive. I just can’t run openSUSE for some buggered reason.
Help!
You have a laptop that has 3 drives? What do you mean by “drive”? What is output of
sudo fdisk -l
sudo ls -l /sys/firmware/efi*
sudo efibootmgr
booted to each of Ubuntu, Debian and TW? You may need to use the (UEFI)BIOS boot menu (F12, F9, or some other hotkey during POST) to boot TW. You may indeed have installed TW “wrong”, BIOS/MBR mode instead of UEFI, or vice versa. All need to be installed in the same mode to avoid needing to use the BIOS to boot the OS of choice.
I will make a guess.
You installed Tumbleweed to use “btrfs”. But you are trying to boot with the Ubuntu installed grub. And the os-prober run on Ubuntu is confused by “btrfs” file systems and the subvolume arrangement.
Best to use the grub2 installed by openSUSE for booting. Or add a chainload option to your Ubuntu grub menu, to chainload openSUSE.
And again, that was a guess. You did not give us much information about your installed system.
Sorry I’m short on information. I don’t know what commands generate the right kind of output that will properly inform a solution to a problem.
mrmazda, I DID just a few minutes ago think to mention that the installation won’t let me choose Master Boot Record as a partition format. It automatically formats to GPT. And Debian’s GRUB (not Ubuntu’s, nrickert, but your same point probably still applies) won’t “see” openSUSE Tumbleweed. probably because it only wants to see MBR partition formats.
I have two solid state drives and one hard disk drive. A lot of storage. My goal is to familiarize myself with GNU/Linux. That’s why I’m putting an operating system on every drive I get. I just want to get to know the various distros, and explain them to others so they won’t be so charmed with Windows anymore … a far leap, I know :\
Disk /dev/sda: 1.8 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
Disk model: CT2000MX500SSD1
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x9db2bedd
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 * 2048 3907028991 3907026944 1.8T 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sdc: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model: CT1000MX500SSD4
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x008d6718
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1 2048 1920239615 1920237568 915.7G 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2 1920241662 1953523711 33282050 15.9G 5 Extended
/dev/sdc5 1920241664 1953523711 33282048 15.9G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
Disk /dev/sdb: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: WDC WD5000BEVT-7
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 1C64A2E3-7DAD-40FA-A738-04AB06578CD0
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sdb1 2048 18431 16384 8M BIOS boot
/dev/sdb2 18432 976773134 976754703 465.8G Linux filesystem
In Debian.
The others produce no useful output, as I’m legacy booting, not UEFI booting.
Hopefully this info is useful. Until then … I will try nrickert’s idea, though TW automatically formatting in GPT is going to cause colossal difficulties and formatting in ext4 might not do that much good.
And I don’t know how to set the TW boot loader to start up instead of the Debian boot loader, but I’ll give it a go.
Your BIOS should provide a way to designate the WD HD as the primary boot device, getting you the TW boot menu instead of Debian’s. GPT partitioning should be a non-issue as long as the TW installation proceeded normally with Grub2 rather than Grub2-efi.
If you boot the TW installation media, do you get a row of function key options at the bottom of the screen? If yes, it’s booting in legacy mode, and thus should/would have installed in legacy mode even with GPT partitioning.
I’m thinking nrickert is right in supposing you have a default TW installation using BTRFS formatting that neither Debian’s nor Ubuntu’s Grub2 support, and why you have no TW entries in their boot menus.
BTW, when you post/paste command output, please include both input and output within code tags ( # above input window ) to preserve the command’s and/or file’s formatting.
Argh. I fear I’ve wasted everyone’s time.
Turns out there IS a way to redo a partition table in the TW installer.
And GPT was precisely the issue … I think.
At least, that’s what the problem seems to have hinged on.
I redid the partition table to MS-DOS, manually set some partitions (which I’ve NEVER done before), and – critically – ran
update-grub
in Debian.
And now all my operating systems know that the others are there. Woo hoo. 
Look, thanks for your help. I’m really glad forums are here in case noobs like me need help stumbling and tripping through our adventures with operating systems we’ve never used.
What’s bizarre is how doing the MS-DOS partition table changed the options in the installer. I couldn’t set a BIOS boot partition, so I had to set it as an EFI boot partition in one menu and a PReP boot partition in the next menu. I would NEVER have thought that that would work. Insanely, it worked.
It says “expert partitioner,” but I was stumbling in the dark and happened to find a right way. Not THE right way … just one of them.
Again, thanks.