Trying to install Leap-15.3 to dual-boot with Windows 10 received pre-installed on the laptop having UEFI system. Ther is no option for the legacy BIOS system.
It has two hard drives: Disk 0 (931 GB) and Disk 1 (245 GB). Disk 1 has an EFI Partition followed by C\ drive having the Windows OS. There is 80 GB disk space free on it, in addition to recovery partitions etct. Disk 0 is Data disk which can have a lot of disk space freed.
I had tried to install Leap-15.3 on the Data Disk 0. After leaving about 300 GB for Data, I made partitions for /, home & swap. But it was not successful because Grub 2 efi could not find an efi partition, because the efi partition is on the other disk, Disk 1.
Should I try to shrink the C\ drive on Disk 1 to make room for /boot/efi, / , home and swap. Can these all be accommodated in about 50 GB?
Hi
You need to use the expert partitioner to tell it which partition that has the efi partition and set to not format and set the mount point from the drop down to /boot/efi else if it actually installed just boot from rescue mode and manually create the entry with efibootmgr using the -d option to point at the correct disk.
Thanks for your brief reply. Just to be clear myself: you mean that by choosing ‘expert partitioner’ will reveal which partition has efi. Then how about the other partitions for /, home and swap? I suppose that space for these has to be created by shrinking the C:\ drive. When I installed on Data Disk 0, I could not see Disk 1 in the listing. Leap-15.3 installed on Disk 0 but it did not boot. There was a warning during installation that the system may fail to boot because there was no /boot/efi or the words to that effect etc.
Hi Nikert,
Thanks for clarifying that the /boot/efi can be installed on Windows efi partition. Will there be enough space for it?
While in the installer you can use *Expert Partitioner - Use existing partitions *to select the EFI System Partition from your drive 1 and mount it to /boot/efi. BEWARE! Do NOT format that existing EFI System Partition or you will loose your MS Windows bootloader.
Hint: In case you want to shrink the MS Windows C:-drive use MS Windows tools to do that.
For* /home* you can either create a separate partition on disk 1 or leave /home on disk 0 but put all your data in a separate partition on disk 1 and symlink the mount point of that partition into your /home.
For the ESP you should be able to use the ESP already provided by MS Windows.
The size of swap depends heavily on the amount of memory your system is equipped with, on what kind of workload you normally produce and whether you want to be able to hibernate your system or not (just a guess: swap-size = size of your systems memory might work).
The size of / depends on whether you want to use snapshots or not and on the overall number of software packages you plan to install (e.g. i use ext4, no snapshots, ~2.600 packages, less than 20GB).
Thanks for such a lucid explanation. I have already shrunk C drive on SSD Disk 1, in Windows and created an unallocated space of 165 GB. I intend puting /boot/efi, / and /swap on this space and /home on HDD Data Disk 0. I am not sure how to link / on SSD Disk and /home on HDD Disk. Could you please illusterate it or explain how it is to be done?
When /home/ is a separate filesystem, it is “linked” via an entry in /etc/fstab that causes it to be mounted on the /home/ directory on the / filesystem. In the YaST partitioner during installation, you select the partition/filesystem on which /home/ lives or will live, then select /home as its mountpoint, and YaST creates the required fstab entry.
In the installer when it comes to setting up the storage devices to be used you choose*** Expert Partitioner*** -> Start with Existing Partitions. There you should see all your storage devices and their current partitions (and even more information on the partitions themselves).
Now you can
create new partitions on a device if there is unused space
delete partitions (BE CAREFUL !!!)
select partitions and put filesystems (e.g. btrfs, ext4, …) on them or just use them as they are (like the existing ESP of MS Windows)
define where a partition should go into your file tree (e.g. as /, as /home, as /boot/efi, …)
The installer will create /etc/fstab which will mount all partition in place on system start up.
Here you can find extensive documentation on all that or just come back here for help.
1.Enter BIOS by pressing F2.
2.Set boot sequence list option to UEFI.
3.Go to SATA operation and choose AHCI.
4. In Advance Boot option click ‘enable legacy option ROMs’. (not available in my laptop, hence, NOT done).
5. Set ‘secure boot’ to ‘disable’
I performed these steps and started installing Leap-15.3. Thanlfully with the ablve tweeks, the SSD Disk was visible and partitions for / (90 GIB and Swap (6 Gib) were made on this disk. On the HDD partition for /home was made for about 300 GiB. Windows EFI partition was mounted on /boot/efi.
After that the rest of the installation went through without any problem and Grub 2 efi menue showed Leap and Windows.
Leap-15.3 worked well and booted fast. But Windows had a problem booting till I restored the above steps back as they initially were.
But after the Windows had booted properly, I checked Leap-15.3 and it had problems in booting. It complained that all disks could not be found.
Now the problem is that Leap-15.3 works only with the above windows tweeks but Windows does not work unless those tweeks are restored.
If I reinstall with the tweeks and have only Windows EFI partition mounted on /boot/efi and shift all other partitions to HDD, to my mind, both Windows and Leap-15.3 should work without the tweeks.
In any case I would attempt this scheme tomorrow and shall let you know.
SATA is set to AHCI in the UEFI and i run MS Windows 10 Prof. and openSUSE Tumbleweed (both placed on the NVMe) in a dual boot setup without any problem.
I suspect i will not be able to provide any further advice.
Just guessing: Probably MS Windows can be successfully re-installed with SATA set to AHCI ?
It seems that Dell tecnology is different. It is over-protective of Windows. The very fact that the article referred in my earlier mail exists shows that Dell has this problem.
However, there seems no solution to dualboot Leap-15.3 with Windows 10 on this Dell computer. I spent the whole day today also hunting for a solution but was unsuccessful.
Anyway, as indicated by other users, install winX fresh (It’s a free download of the latest release) and get rid of the vendor cruft? I always do that, boot rescue system, clean out the NVRAM entries, pre-partition the disk, re-install windows, then install openSUSE.
Hi
Either a live USB rescue image, or the install media rescue option. For removing the entries that’s via the efibootmgr command, likewise command line for re-partitioning is gdisk. For windows aside from the windows install, the efi partition 260M is good type ef00 and also a 16MB type 0c01 for windows.
For example this is my laptop that dual boots.
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 534527 260.0 MiB EF00 EFI System
2 534528 567295 16.0 MiB 0C01 Microsoft reserved
3 567296 52996095 25.0 GiB 8300 Linux filesystem
4 52996096 84453375 15.0 GiB 8300 Linux filesystem
5 84453376 87599103 1.5 GiB 8200 Linux swap
6 87599104 233170502 69.4 GiB 0700 Microsoft basic data
7 233170944 234440703 620.0 MiB 2700
Thanks for the prompt reply. The first part is clear.
For the second question, is the command ‘efibootmanager’ to be given via Windows prompt? But it will not change the partitions while the windows is working. Kindly clarify.