Installing 13.1 on Aspire R7

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I’m trying to to dual boot w8.1 and openSUSE 13.1 (GNOME) on my Acer, and I don’t really know how. This is a new computer, and I’ve installed several distros on my old Satellite, but never on this box. I’ll outline my difficulties, and I hope you can help.

  1. I couldn’t boot from USB. I fixed this by changing the BIOS mode from UEFI to Legacy (I have no idea what this means, but it worked).

  2. I opened the Live CD and started going through YaST.

  3. I used the default partition setings.

  4. Partition setup finished, and YaST told me to restart and remove my USB. I did this. This is where the problem is. I booted up and (when in Legacy mode) my Acer told me there was no OS (from startup - I didn’t access any menu or anything). I changed to UEFI and deleted my linux partitions (because Windows showed that I had them when the GRUB menu did not).

What do I do?

tl;dr -My computer told me no OS was installed. Fix it.

#2

Ouch you did it about all wrong

The new machine appears to be a EFI BIOS so you need to install in UEFI mode. You may have to select that in the BIOS boot screen. But in any case you should have asked here before you guessed something you did not understand.

Basically you should not mix boot modes. EFI booting is differnet from the older MBR booting. In theory you can mix them but you really have to understand all the little differences.

So install via EFI mode the ISO image is made to do it so how did you put the image on the USB stick??? Did you use the instruction from here

https://en.opensuse.org/Live_USB_stick

or some random stuff off the Net?

#3

But now you will not be able to boot Windows unless you change it back to UEFI.

Opensuse does support UEFI. On some computers, you might have to disable secure-boot, though that should work too on most computers.

To use opensuse with UEFI, you will need to install the 64-bit version. There is no UEFI support for 32-bit. More specifically, it is part of the UEFI standard, that the booting be done in the native mode of the computer. And for a Windows system using UEFI, this will be 64-bit, so you need the 64-bit opensuse to install.

Create the install USB by copying the iso to the USB as a raw device. The ImageWriter software is supposed to do this, though some folk have had problems with the Windows version. Other methods of generating a USB might break UEFI support.

I’m mostly support what gogalthorp has already told you in his reply. I just wanted to add a couple of points (such as the need for 64-bit).