I am trying to install SUSE Leap 42.3 from a USB stick. I want it to be installed on a particular partition (sb5 for main and sb6 for swap) and I do not want other partitions to be deleted!
Now, Suse offers a nice looking interface for partitioning at installation but it is completely unclear to me how to determine the actual installation location with this. When press “accept” and look at the “suggested partioning” it seems to be going to delete partitions that I want to be retained… I just don’t understand how to make sure where to install exactly, (including where the bootloader will go…) ((this is much cleared with the Ubuntu installation process: It shows a Before and an After situation))
Hi and welcome to the Forum
You need to select ‘Expert Mode’ button, then on that page hit the rescan disks button, when that’s finished, in the left hand column select your disk, then setup the partitions as required.
The final summary screen will tell you where the bootloader will go, again here you can select where ‘You’ want it to go…
If this is efi booting, then make sure you select it as /boot/efi as the mount point and not to format if you have existing efi booting…
And of course you should “know” your present system and what partitions you have now and what they are used for. Nobody, we nor the installer can really guess that.
At that point, there should be a button for “create partitioning”. Click that.
On the next screen, select “custom partitioning”.
That should give you a screen showing only the partitions that already exist.
Then right-click on a partition, and select “Edit”. That allows you to change that partition. For the main partition, you will want to set it to format the partition, and to mount the partition at “/”. When setting to format, you can specify which file system. If the partition already has a linux file system, it will default to that, but you can change it. For the swap partition, set it to format as swap and mount as swap.
Also you need free unpartitioned space to install to. If the drive is full what should the installer do??? Unless you are reusing existing partition in that case tell the install which how to format and where to mount them
Here is an example of what you should see when you launch Expert Partitioner during your Installation. The following displays a recommended layout when no old partitions exist.
You’ll note in the right pane “Available Storage on Install”
The first line is the physical disk (sda) followed by the recommended new partitions (sda1, sda2, sda3), their sizes, thier file system type and their mounted partition names (swap, / , /home).
Note that the default suggestion is to create <all> these partitions in free, unformatted space.
If you have any existing partitions, they would display as additional partitions, or if on different disks you would see at least one additional disk (eg sdb) on the left pane (A detected and read USB stick would read as an additional disk).
The following is an example what you would see when you double-click on an existing or recommended partition
When you click on the “Edit” button, you can modify how it’s mounted. So, for example if you have an existing old /home partition, you woul want to delete this /home partition the Installer offers to create for you, then double-click on your existing partition and specify it be mounted as /home and then finally re-size your / partition to fill the remaining free space which was originally allocated to the /home you don’t want.
Similarly to how I just described one common maneuver re-using an old /home partition, you can point your swap and / partitions to non-default locations.
NOT if installing in EFI mode to do a EFI boot not a MBR boot. The OP did not make it clear if installing in EFI or legacy boot so please be careful of your advice.
Thanks for all the useful information! I will retry the installation with this knowledge.
However the user interface concept of clearly showing a Before and an After situation would still be an improvement and take away uncertainty about exactly what will be changed with the installation. Perhaps in a next release?
