Installing 15.5 on a Windows 11 laptop?

Hi,
I want to install 15.5 on a Windows laptop. The documentation here: Installation - Howto… suggest that it should be as trivial as letting the installer do the work for me.

4.1.4 Dual Boot … openSUSE needs to be installed on a separate partition/disk.
But you can also let the openSUSE installer resize your MS Windows partitions.

I have run the installer up to the “GO” point. But I see no mention or confirmation that it is going to produce a dual boot system for me. Should it not prompt me for my Grub preferences?
Can anyone assure me that all will be well? … Before I Press the Button!!
Regards, Martin

What’s the “GO” point?

At some point during the install, you should see a recommended partitioning. You can continue beyond that without it writing to disk. You should be able to see from the partitioning, whether it is preserving Windows.

After the partitioning section, you should see a summary screen. That’s where you can click on “Booting” to set grub preferences.

Somewhere, later in the install, there is a place where it warns you that it will change what is on the disk. Until you click that “Install” button, nothing on the disk is changed and you can abort without affecting Windows.

In my opinion, it is better to have Windows shrink the Windows partition before you start the openSUSE installer.

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I most emphatically back this statement. It is the safest way.

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I emphatically agree that having Windows shrink Windows is best.

For maximum possible shrinkage, or as much as you’d like, it may be necessary to use its procedure more than once. Hibernation may need to be disabled, and swap file size may need to be shrunk to zero, to get the size you want.

Be sure in the bootloader section of installation that you check the box to probe foreign OS, so that Windows appears in your Grub boot menu when installation has completed.

Thank you all for your advice. But I have a supplementary question, if I may:
Yes, I remember/see the “Probe Foreign OS” (which is set) But I also though I would see the prototype boot menu? Which was able to report all the bootable drives that the install has found - with the option to reorder as I wished.
In this exercise, there is nothing in the “Default Boot Selection” after clicking on the Drop Down arrow, which is making me fearful that the only boot device will be 15.5 and not Windows.
It is a very long time since I have done this sort of thing and I would rather be safe than sorry!!

Regards, Martin

Is this in the installer, Martin? If it is, click on the button to finish boot loader setup, (it won’t have written yet), then reload the boot loader setup and look again. Are there now listings in the dropdown?

Hi Fraser,
Yes, it is. But I was hoping for some sort of confirmation (either within the installer or from the community) that it would be okay - BEFORE I press the Install button and possibly loose the Windows boot support.
Regards, M.

Just to confirm. I have been up to this point …
image
… and back to the Boot Loader Setup. But still nothing in the Default Boot Section?

Anything else I can do to check that I’m going to get a working Dual Boot system?

Regards, M.

As far as I know, it gets that “Default Boot” section from “grub.cfg”. But “grub.cfg” does not exist until it starts writing to disk.

As long as the Windows partitions are not touched by the install, you should be okay. I’m assuming that you are using UEFI, and that your partitioning includes “/boot/efi” for the EFI partition.

Sorry. Don’t know enough to answer the questions concisely: Is this a suitable answer?
Windows view of disc before I start ( as you suggest, I have shrunk (one) of the Windows partitions)


During the 15.5 install, this is suggested partition scheme:

As the disc/partition naming between the two OS are different, I have no idea if 15.5 is overwriting any of the Windows boot information or not.

I feel that this shouldn’t be this hard - or shall I just go back to the “dark side”!

Regards, M.

No, it isn’t. If it were, it would list a partition to be deleted.

You should be okay.

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Thank you Neil et al,
… done! And all it well. Sorry for my timidity but without the feedback I was hoping for in the installer, the risk was too high to rush ahead.

Small supplementary question. Is there a GUI applet to alter the cosmetic view of grub.cfg?
I’d like to change the wording and order of the boot menu.

Regards, M.

If you now go into Yast Boot Loader, you can re-order the boot, now that you are up and running.

Hmmm…
If you mean this Yast Boot Loader, I don’t think I can?


All I think I can do here is set the default option. The option that will run on timeout.
I can’t change the wording or change the line order. So, for example, I can’t change text “Windows Boot Manager 9on /dev/nvme0n1p1” to “Windows 11” and move it to the top of the list.
I have also explored the available options on the Grub boot screen. They seem even more limited there.
I have also looked at grub.cfg!!! I don’t think I’ll be trying to edit that directly.

No, you can’t rename it here, but the one you choose as the Default will become the one at the top of the list.

Here is where you will find the information you need for additional customizing.

Thank you all very much for your help. I’ve (at last) got the laptop booting the way I would like.
For others that may follow, this was my solution.
I could not invest the time needed in a one-off exercise to understand the workings of the GRUB bootloader as suggested by Fraser (above). So I used grub-customizer.
The problem with this OpenSUSE package is that it needs a whole mountain of dependant libraries - and it still errors-out anyway.
So I compiled from source. Job done. And thanks once again.
Regards, M.

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It is set not to delete windows partitions unless there is no unallocated space.

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