Hello my friends,
I have several distros installed on my pc so I can test them thoroughly and I thought I should give Tumbleweed a shot.
I installed it setting bootcode on /root and not MBR. After restarting my pc I expected to boot into my primary distro to
update-grub so I can reboot into Tumbleweed but instead I got:
GRUB loading.
Welcome to GRUB!
incompatible licence
Aborted. Press any key to exit.
Thank you for finding the time to read this.
Hi
So which system is controlling boot? This is a check grub does with the mod files, so one has a funky license…
Hi,
It’s PCLinuxOS.
Hi
Have you asked in their forum?
What is your current disk structure, boot from the tumbleweed install medium and select rescue mode, user is root, no password (as in just press enter);
lsblk
fdisk -l /dev/sda
Hi,
No, I did not address their forum. Done what you wrote and here 's the output:
sda 8:0 0 298.1G 0 disk
sda2 8:2 0 111G 0 part
sda9 8:9 0 20G 0 part
sda7 8:7 0 10.2G 0 part
sda10 8:10 0 68.2G 0 part
sda5 8:5 0 48.9G 0 part
sda3 8:3 0 1K 0 part
sda1 8:1 0 100M 0 part
sda8 8:8 0 34.2G 0 part
sda6 8:6 0 3.9G 0 part
Hope this helps.
You probably need to reinstall grub on the system you want to be the master boot system.
I’m guessing that something went wrong with your install. When you install booting in the root partition, the default is to write generic boot code to the MBR. Unless you unchecked that box, it probably messed up your existing MBR boot code.
It is true, that was the worst part of the installer for being kind of vague. I hit *next *when I saw this picture:
Install bootcode on /root (install on MBR)
Do not install bootcode on MBR (install on /root)
or something like that, I don’t remember quite well, so it gave me the picture it installed GRUB on /root, but
nothing from that point went as expected.
As no further help is coming from the community, the way I see it the only option I have to get
my pc back to life is reinstalling tumbleweed and setting its bootloader on MBR.
I would have done that right from the start, having suspected that openSUSE is one of those distros
that do not feel comfortable with their bootloader installed on /root and thus not having bothered you
at all, but I was not sure about one thing and this is my question now:
After tumbleweed 's bootloader installation on MBR by giving **update-grub **will it see all of the other
installed distros so I can boot into them?
This is important because I have some data I need in one of them!
Thank you in advance for your help.
Well the boot flag must be set on the boot partition you want to boot to if a generic MBR is used. Any time you install multiple OS you must pay close attention to the partition scheme screen it tells exactly what the installer is going to do. So read it completely and under stand it before accepting
Even if this doesn’t really answers the question I asked, thank you very much for the time you spent dealing with my problem and your will for helping me my friend.
This is what I am going to do: I will try the re-installation thing and inform you how it went. Actually I think I should do this right from the start without even bothering you! I just was a bit over-reluctant because of a translation I am working on and have saved in a distribution into there.
May I suggest that you download a nice bootable ISO like gparted iso, and it will mount your other distros and even a windows distro, so you can copy data you want off your computer.
It is easy to make a mistake when you reinstall and wipe all your data out.
Backup FIRST then REINSTALL AFTER you have all your data backed up!
Then if you make a mistake during reinstall you won’t lose permanently all your data. I say this because I have been too quick and made mistakes and erased all my data.
Warren
Hello Warren,
thank you very much for your smart tips and time. I am sorry for loosing all of your data by beeing too quick, but you know it happens…
This is my question that nobody answered but don’t worry, I guess openSUSE 's bootloader couldn’t be that different so why not, it **should **work!!!
So, I will boot gparted, delete tumbleweed 's partitions (don’t worry, I got no data stored in there) and re-install it setting its bootloader on MBR. This way I will be
able to play a bit with tumbleweed and who knows, I might have found my distribution of choice and stop experimenting by installing distributions!
Thanks again for your help my friend!
It does work the question is why is it not working for you
Accidentally leaving generic MBR code may be a reason. If generic code is used you must set the boot flag to the partition you want to boot and there must be grub or other boot code installed on that partition. Not knowing the details of the other OS boot set up makes it very hard to guess. Problem is with multiple OS there is a bunch of possible combinations of boot set up not all will work/
For what you wanted you would install Grub to the OS boot partition And be certain the installer does not touch the MBR in any way. It is all laid out on the partition scheme screen before you accept it.
After install you must go to the controlling OS and add the new OS to it’s boot screen.
But somewhere you dropped a stitch. My guess is you installed generic MBR code to the MBR which is the default if you chose grub to boot partition. Also to compound the problem your other OS probably had set grub code to the MBR. But I’m guessing because you have not supplied enough info to analyse completely.
IMHO if you can boot EFI use the EFI boot for all OS because MBR boot has always been a bit confusing.
Thank you very much for the useful information mate. I really appreciate it!
Well, to make a long story short, I did exactly what I wrote, that is delete tumbleweed partition using gparted
and re-installed tumbleweed setting its bootcode on MBR. That was it! Everything went back to normal! After
the first minutes of tumbleweed exploration I realized it was not much of a distribution for me, but hey, I got
my pc back!
Thank you all beautiful people of opensuse community that spent time in my issue and helped me!!!
I don’t see any thread marked as [SOLVED] but in case I have to mark it that way please inform me how to do
this.