I have a 500GB disk partitioned using legacy MBR
with extended partitions prepared for LEAP 15.2
My goal is to use Legacy Windows Boot Manager and EasyBCD
It worked well on 42.3
What selections would I make for booting when installing
Leap on the "extended partitions below.
(Shown after installing Windows-7 and Windows-10
which are running fine using EasyBCD.
Thanks in advance
-------------------- SNIP -----------------------
Disk Partitions Cylinders Heads Sectors Mbytes Model
2 7 60801 255 63 476940.0 TOSHIBA HDWD105
Partition Status Type Volume Label Mbytes System Usage
1 PRIMARY 150005.3 NTFS/HPFS 31%
2 PRIMARY 150005.4 NTFS/HPFS 31%
3 EXTENDED 176926.8 37%
F: 4 LOGICAL LINUX 90004.8 FAT32 19%
G: 5 LOGICAL BOOT 101.9 FAT16 1%
H: 6 LOGICAL SWAP 12001.7 FAT32 3%
I: 7 LOGICAL DATA 74818.3 FAT32 16%
To start with, you cannot install on a FAT32 filesystem. It would mean that all linux permissions, needed for a proper system, would not work, could not hbeenave for 42.3 either.
A second thing is that 15.2 has not been released yet, it just entered beta stage ~1 week ago.
Just be sure that you boot the installer in traditional MBR mode (and not in UEFI mode). That way, the defaults for booting should be fine.
Perhaps you also need to tell the installer to boot from a custom partition. And specify that partition to be your root partition (I cannot tell which that is from what you list).
I’m inclined to suggest using “ext4” for your root partition. The installer default is to use “btrfs”, but I’m not sure whether that works with EasyBCD.
What made you decide on these sizes? Unless you plan to install every possible software you can find, and/or are a Linux programmer, you’re likely overallocating space to / and to swap, while boot is rather small, and probably better off not a separate partition, unless you have a specific reason to keep it separate. If you do have a reason, you’d be better off putting it on a primary, to make instructing the openSUSE installer set up the bootloader easiest for EasyBCD to use. If you plan to use BTRFS for / instead of EXT4, it needs to be ample, but 90G seems overabundant within the context of your other sizes.
Largest / partition I’ve ever created on any of my own PCs, all of which only use EXT3 or EXT4, is ~20GB. Most actually consume far less than half that much disk space.
The installer does not offer that choice. That was a choice at some time in the past, but not with the current installer.
It will give you a choice of “boot from MBR” or “boot from partition”.
If you select “boot from partition”, it will tell you that it is using the partition containing “/boot”. However, it will actually be set to boot from the extended partition (which does contain “/boot” as part of a logical partition within that extended partition). But that is not what you want for EasyBCD.
There is a third choice – boot from a custom partition. You should select that.
Apart from that, I’m unsure of your partitioning, since you show everything as FAT32. But perhaps that is just temporary, and the installer will change to a linux file system.
If your plan is to have a separate “/boot” (presumably partition 5), then you can specify that as your custom boot partition. It will probably show as “/dev/sda6” in linux. Format it to use “ext2” (or “ext3” or “ext4”). And that’s the partition to tell EasyBCD to use for booting.
Please note, however, that 101M is small for “/boot”. If you can still change your partitioning, I suggest 500M to leave a little elbow room.
With your setup the safest way is choosing “Boot from Extended Partition” if you find that option in the installer. Otherwise choose the first one in the extended, the “F” partition and use it for / (root); the position of the other partitions in the extended is more vulnerable to disk error. I don’t see the need for a /boot in an MBR install unless you have unusual needs.
[EDIT] apparently @nrickert knows better, follow his advice…
I have Leap 15.2 in a virtual machine, with a separate “/boot”. Here’s the size information:
% df /boot
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 495844 92989 377255 20% /boot
The partition used “ext2”, and is a 500M partition. As you, it is currently using 93M of that partition.
At present, there are two kernels in “/boot”. So that’s a little under 50M for each kernel. It is normal for there to be two kernels – the most recently installed kernel, and the previous one as a fallback alternative.
Here’s the issue. When there is a kernel update, you will have three kernels until the oldest one has been removed. And three kernels is going to use almost 150M of space. It won’t fit in a 101M partition.