nrickert wrote:
>
> Will Honea;2592726 Wrote:
>> Trying to update W8->8.1 here, the MS site would not even begin the
>> upgrade download (3.5Gb d/l) w/o a minimum of 20 Gb free disk space on
>> the W* partition.
>
> I’m putting that off for a few days. Let us know how it goes.
>
Interim report.
Played 52-pickup with the disk arrangement. Since I had a pretty big chunk
of unused space near the end of the disk, I first resized/moved the two
existing oS installations to gain enough room to expand the W8 partition
plus adding a third oS installation for throwaway use. Gotta love these 2Tb
drives! To keep things usable, I resized then moved the partitions from one
oS installation at a time then rebooted to the one not yet touched to make
sure the access was still there. Time consuming, but it beat the heck out
of some wierd recovery effort later. I used gparted to resize the Linux
partitions and it worked without a hitch but moving partitions such that the
result overlaps the original space can be VERY slow…
Once I had everything, including the swap partition, moved to clear enough
space to allow W8 to expand as needed, I booted Windows and let it expand
itself by 30Gb. One caution - free enough space to expand Windows then
leave an extra 10-12Gb above that. The expansion or update will want to
create a recovery partition during the update.
Now the fun began. The update wiped all openSUSE entries in the BIOS boot
table - only Win8.1 was left. Rather than trying to put my fat fingers into
the efi boot tables, I simply ran a basic install of 13.1 to the space I had
left free. That recreated the boot entries for the Linux partitions and was
probably faster than a manual recovery. After installing a clean copy of
13.1, all was well.
Since everything was working, I also used Win8.1 to install a BIOS update
from HP. That wiped the boot tables again but a quick reinstall of the 13.1
test partitions fixed that - again. Few people will got through this since
BIOS updates are fairly rare, but consider it. I should have done that as
soon as I did the Win 8.1 update; that would have bypassed one 13.1
installation.
Since I had everything working, I decided to try an update of the backup
12.3 installation to 13.1. That produced an interesting result: the updated
installation would not boot - couldn’t find a kernel to boot. The new 13.1
installation still booted, the existing 12.3 and W8.1 all both booted OK.
After booting those, I changed the boot order for the grub menu to make 12,3
the default using the clean 13.1 system. After that clean system rewrote
the efi boot tables, the udated 12.3-13.1 system decided to boot - but it
had a wierd entry in the grub menu. It identified the updated 12.3 system
with some long string about the deprecated suse-release file, but the sytem
now booted. After a couple more reboots, that wierd string disappeared and
a proper entry suddenly appeared - don’t ask me how as I have no idea.
Summary: updating Win8->8.1 will probably hose your efi boot table. Before
you start, make sure you have at least 20 Gb free for the W8 system.
gparted worked just fine for moving disk partitions around and GPT keeps the
original partition numbers so you don’t need to worry about changing the
partition order as you do with MBR disks. Having room to do a clean install
of Linux is a simple way of fixing any efi boot issues.
–
Will Honea