Computer: HP Pavillion, Intel I5 8250 and Windows 10. Trying to overwrite hard drive with Open SuSe. Legacy boot enabled, booting from DVD drive with Net install disk, which has one previous successful install to its credit.
Installation program proceeds to the point where it should display a suggested partitioning scheme, when the Device Error pop-up appears, and no partitioning recommendation appears. The ‘details’ available is the 'cannot delete MDContainer" message.
BIOS changes made were enabling legacy boot and moving the DVD drive to the top of the boot order. Undoing those changes restored Windows to operation, but I still want to install LEAP.
If Windows is installed this is probably an UEFI BIOS. and Windows is probably installed using EFI booting. If so it is truly best to install any other OS using EFI booting since you can not chain between legacy and EFI.
Is there some reason you want to mix boot methods? Boot the DVD in EFI mode to install using EFI booting.
Problem (just a guess) may be that there is not enough room on the first track to deal with hybrid booting since it requires a separate partition table.
BIOS changes made were enabling legacy boot and moving the DVD drive to the top of the boot order. Undoing those changes restored Windows to operation, but I still want to install LEAP.
It seems that some NVMe devices are only supported with EFI, at least on some computers.
But no problem. Leap should work well with EFI. Just be sure to boot the installer in EFI mode.
I interpreted this Forum post differently…
Instead, I thought the essential part is that there are likely Windows partitions on the disk.
The solution in that post was to run gparted from a LiveCD to remove the Windows partitions, but I assume that you could remove the partitions a number of different ways equally well, eg fdisk, gparted live.
The point is that since a MSWindows install will fill an entire disk by default, if you don’t remove the partition(s), there won’t be room on the disk to install openSUSE although I’m not sure why the error you see is thrown. No layout can be proposed if there is no room on the disk, maybe for some odd reason then the install is guessing that you’re trying to install as an isolated container within the existing OS.
If this is the problem (no disk space available), this is a simple and old issue, if you want to replace MSWindows, you have to remove the Windows partition first. If you want to dual-boot, then you have to shrink the MSWindows partition to make room for the openSUSE install. The openSUSE install requires available free, unpartitioned space.
Resolution: Followed the advice above to use EFI install using a live CD and parted to re-partition the disk. Still had a fight with the live-CD when trying to install (over formatting the partitions). So used a LEAP 15.1 DVD to install. As I write this, the install has just passed the half-way mark. It’s mostly downhill now. Thanks for the help.