installed, cannot get it to boot

Hi all,

I installed Tumbleweed wanting to give it a try (I use elementaryOS currently and countless things are just broken for me, the display performance is terrible using two screens and I need an up to date kernel)
Everything went fine during the installation except for one error message at the end which went something like:

execution of command "parted -s /dev/nvme0n1 disk_set pmbr_boot on" failed

The system could not boot into Tumbleweed afterwards. This was an iso image from sometime in December and I tried to install it on two different machines - Dell Precision laptop and a desktop, but both gave me the same error and could not boot. Some time later I downloaded newer image (openSUSE-Tumbleweed-GNOME-Live-x86_64-Snapshot20170104 this time) and attempted the install again, but received the same error.

This time I investigated and tried to repair the grub:

  1. I accessed the install from the live image along the lines of this help https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/startup/html/book.opensuse.startup/cha.trouble.html#sec.trouble.data.recover.rescue.access
  2. I tried to reinstall grub using efibootmgr
  3. efibootmgr -v
    listed the Linux boot entry this time 1. I could change the boot order with efibootmgr
  4. I could however not unmount the mount points after exiting chroot for some reason lsof
    did not show me why 1. This time I could choose the Linux boot entry in bios, but it would not even load grub and ask me for a bootable media instead

I made a screenshot of the error message in yast and another one with the efibootmgr messages but I can’t attach them here…

my attempted install settings were:
root (no separate /home) on btrfs /dev/nvme0n1p4
/boot/efi on existing /dev/nvme0n1p1
swap somewhere on /dev/sda
snapshots enabled

Is there anything I can do to boot the system? Thank you for any help!


edit:
BTW it is great that the live USB has a permanent storage, I did not try many distros (some Ubuntus and elementary versions), but it never worked in those

Looks to me that your boot partition isn’t initialized.
Nowadays, it’s optional to use the legacy method storing that disk information in the master boot record.

I <think> that your install was supposed to use the MBR.

The following are different ways to re-initialize the mbr, take your pick

  1. If you have an Install DVD, have you tried to simply run a repair? Assume that the repair should discover the problem automatically and fix it.
  2. From a LiveCD, you can run “fdisk /mbr” against the bootable disk.
  3. You can run gparted live and set the mbr.

TSU

Upload them to http://susepaste.org

the screenshots:
http://susepaste.org/23543646
http://susepaste.org/3a7ba314

The disk is GPT, I booted in EFI mode and the existing windows is in EFI mode as well
Do you suggest I add some extra information to the disk/partition or would that simply mean formating the disk?

opensuse does not have good support for the live disk method, traditional and best is to download the FULL dvd and use dd to write to usb (dont use the disk imaging tools) or whatever method is recommended if you have to use windows, if this does not work then write back.

Is it when booting Live ISO? This suggests problem with installation media; try using full installation image first.

SUSE Paste

I do not know what “Linux” menu entry refers to, but it does not contain openSUSE boot options. It is trivial to fix it by chrooting into installed system and running a couple of commands, but it is unclear what other problem you may encounter after this strange error in the first picture. So I would suggest clean reinstall from full ISO.

For general info the GeckoLinux distro is openSUSE and does do live boot

yes, that is the Gnome Live image, the installation seemed to have gone fine otherwise, the files are on the disk

that is exactly what I tried to achieve - after the installation finished (with the error) I chrooted into it and tried to reinstall grub.
It did not let me write into /mnt/boot/efi for some reason (you can see in the second screenshot), but after using efibootmgr to install grub it did show the Linux entry which could not be any other distro - i have never installed any other on that machine.

I will try the big image when I have some time!

Well, this means you did not really chroot into it or you mounted it in wrong place. Please paste exact commands and their output you used for this.