Hello, everyone! I am proud to say this is my first post on the openSUSE forums and anything related to openSUSE at all. I got interested in openSUSE today (I’ve come from using ubuntu for a month or two and I tried kubuntu, but kubuntu does KDE really badly) and decided to make a live CD. I have my CD and I’m typing this post with it right now.
I need someone to either write up or link me to a comprehensive and specific guide for starting with a Vista install and regular boot and ending with a dual boot between openSUSE 11 and Windows Vista Business using GRUB.
I plan to give 35GB of my 160GB hard drive to Linux and leave the rest to Windows.
In the guide, please specify if I should resize the Vista partition from Windows and create 35GB of unallocated space or if this will work fine doing it in the openSUSE installer. I would prefer the easier method.
I want to do this right the first time, meaning I don’t want to have to check out some guide for fixing a boot error or something. I tried to install myself but I got an error that said I cannot install the bootloader, which just screams “bad”. It says “The boot partition is of type NFS. Bootloader cannot be installed.”
I have no idea what that means and I’m hoping someone can help me through this. I really like openSUSE; it really shows more than ubuntu can and is much, much more polished and complete.
>please specify if I should resize the Vista partition from Windows and create 35GB of
>unallocated space or if this will work fine doing it in the openSUSE installer.
Yes, on Vista, you want to ‘shrink’ the partition using their new functionality that
they provide. See this:
iN my experience, shrinking your Vista partition can reak havoc with your Vista install. If your are using Ultimate and have enabled bitlocker the the answer is NO!!!
Bitlocker creates a “checksum” for your entire HDD. If things dont match on reboot then all turns sour.
Best of luck and it wont be long before you have a 20/80 windows/linux machine. The 20 will be for gaming and thats all…
I see. As I stated before, I am using Vista Business, so I don’t even have bitlocker. I’ve dual booted with ubuntu before, but now I want to try openSUSE. The thing that scares me is that when I have the drive fully used by Vista and I start the openSUSE installer, I resize the partitions right, but at the end when I review the changes, it says the bootloader cannot be installed.
I’d attach a screenshot but I guess I’m not a high enough level or something. Hold on, let me get one on photobucket.
When installing ubuntu, there is an option during the disk part that is “Guided- use largest continuous free space”. Is there something like that in the openSUSE installer? If I use Vista’s disk management tool to shrink the Vista partition, then is there an option to tell openSUSE to install in that unallocated space?
>
> When installing ubuntu, there is an option during the disk part that is
> “Guided- use largest continuous free space”. Is there something like
> that in the openSUSE installer? If I use Vista’s disk management tool
> to shrink the Vista partition, then is there an option to tell openSUSE
> to install in that unallocated space?
I normally work from a Lenovo J-series desktop that came with Vista
pre-installed. There is one item in my BIOS setup that may apply to you:
the BIOS has an option for locking the recovery and MBR portion of the
disk. Guess what? It will do exactly that if you tell it to. Makes it
really hard to install much of anything <g>.
I used Vista to shrink itself, the made sure the recovery disks worked
(don’t know why - I have a corp. version of XP Pro to cover any Win apps -
but then I’m a packrat by nature) then booted the openSUSE DVD. It will
plug along, asking a few questions as it goes, until it get to a page
filled with descriptions of what it proposes to install. If there is a
pre-existing version of Linux on the disk, it usually proposes to install
to the same location. If there is enough free space on the drive, it will
propose creation of 3 partitons - /, /home, and swap. That should be your
case after initially shrinking Vista. Take that option and let it run.
Assuming you don’t have a BIOS block on your drive, the boot will take you
to a grub menu where Windows is a boot choice along with 2 flavors of
openSUSE: normal and safe mode.
It really is that simple as long as you have a single drive. As you likely
have already found out, Vista is very stingy about releasing disk space.
Normally, you will be lucky to get anywhere close to half the disk freed
when you resize and that assumes you’ve used all the tricks like defragging
and packing the disk first. If you have multiple drives and Vista, things
get pretty tricky with drive enumeration issues between BIOS, Vista, and
Linux but with a single drive you should be in the clear. Just let the
installer have at with the free space.
