Leap 42.1 x86_64 net installer is confusing me.

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I’ve been out of touch for a while. Been busy using my computer to write a book,
was working on the sequel when my old mono-processor HP Pavilion became unreliable.

Fortunately my Brother in law is a dedicated Windows user, because when he destroyed
the copy of win 7 on his much newer quad-core Pavilion, he let me have the tower.

So I backed up my data, and began moving into my new multi-boot home. I plan to run
Mageia, Opensuse & Antix Linux on it. I happened to start with Mageia, which is now
working nicely (After much head scratching trying to remember all the little tweaks
I’d done to make it work my way over the years I’ve been multi-booting on the old PC.)

Now I’m ready to add Opensuse. And suddenly I heard about Leap, Thought I might as
well give it a try.

So I downloaded openSUSE-Leap-42.1-NET-x86_64.iso and burned it to disk. But when I
told the installer to use my preformatted partition set up it balked because I
didn’t leave a fat partition for some EFI thing. My PC may be capable of doing an EFI
boot. But I ONLY use legacy bios. I Will be using my own grub legacy boot loader that
NONE of the installed Linux will be allowed to automatically update. I generally tell
them to install their boot loader to their root partition. Then I manually copy the
vmlinuz and initrd files to my boot loader partition.

But I was unable to find any way to tell the installer that I was NOT using EFI…
Since it took me so long to get the Mageia working the way I want it, I wasn’t
going to continue with an installer that doesn’t believe in BIOS anymore.

Has Opensuse’s installers gone totally EFI centric now? Or am I missing something
obvious?

Or more to the point, If I blow by that warning will I be able to get the installer
to cooperate with installing it’s boot loader to the root partition? Or some other
method of insuring that it doesn’t mess with my MBR or the partition’s dedicated to
my other Linux distros?

–
JtWdyP

#2

This is defined by the way installation CD is booted. It is outside of openSUSE control - either your system boots CD in legacy BIOS mode or in EFI mode. CD is bootable both ways. What initial screen you get - is it with F1, F2, … on the bottom or simple text menu with several options?

Also if you are using GPT disk partitioning, grub2 may need special partition (it depends on exact setup). You did not give enough information to know what happens.

#3

It would appear that on Jun 10, arvidjaar did say:

> jtwdyp;2781555 Wrote:
> >
> > But I was unable to find any way to tell the installer that I was NOT
> > using EFI…
> This is defined by the way installation CD is booted. It is outside of
> openSUSE control - either your system boots CD in legacy BIOS mode or in
> EFI mode. CD is bootable both ways. What initial screen you get - is it
> with F1, F2, … on the bottom or simple text menu with several options?

Well then I guess my HP Pavilion’s DVD drive likes to boot in EFI mode…
Perhaps I can use the bios “boot menu” to manually select the DVD drive as a legacy
device… Failing that my other option would be to try plugging in my portable {usb}
DVD drive to see if that will boot the disk in legacy mode…

Or: Can grub legacy somehow chainload a DVD device???

If by ‘initial screen’ you mean the one I usually see just before the grub menu. Then
what I get looks to me like a blue background with an image of a hand tossing some
trash at a circle with a big “HP” in it.

It has a small number by itself that’s “7.07” or possibly “07.07”
and at the bottom a line of text that tells me to push the escape key for the startup
menu, from which one of the choices is that “boot menu” I mentioned 3 paragraphs ago.

Otherwise when the DVD boots I get a brief text message on a black background, that I
had to reboot several times to see that it said:

Failed to set MokListRT:
Not Found

Then it’s quickly replaced by the DVD’s colorful boot menu.

> Also if you are using GPT disk partitioning, grub2 may need special
> partition (it depends on exact setup). You did not give enough
> information to know what happens.

Using MBR NOT GPT…

As to my setup: At the moment the only installed OS is Mageia 5 Linux
Which was installed via an IsoDumper produced flash drive…

Incidentally before I went out and bought some DVD+R disks, I tried using the IsoDumper
I installed to Mageia, to make a bootable flash drive with the leap iso. But it failed
to boot. So I bought some disks and burned it…

I normally have at least three Linux installed. I mount a user owned data partition
that gets mounted when my user logs in to ANY installed Linux. User owned via:

Wherever possible I avoid UUID= in favor of human parseable LABEL= fstab and
menu.lst entries. And I always confine each installed Linux to a single partition.
Excluding swaps of course…

I boot to what used to be called runlevel 3. Though my first user task is ‘usually’ to
start a customised openbox session with startx. I actually define LABEL or UUID based
fstab entries for all my flash drives so any user account can.


mount $custom_mountpoint

This HP Pavilion had a single “terabyte” Hard drive. I salvaged the 200 gig sata
drive from the old PC. Here is how my drive partitions look to Mageia:
Note: I’ve added some “line end” comments to the ls -l section

–
JtWdyP

#4

If you want MBR then you must tell the BIOS to boot the DVD in MBR mode. The DVD boots in either mode but the BIOS is what does the boot.

.

#5

Yes.

But, to do this, you must have done all of the partitioning before the install. Otherwise the installer will switch to GPT partitioning.

It’s okay to tell the partitioner to format, but do not allow it to change the partitions (other than formatting).

When you get to the summary screen, click on “Booting” (or similar). Tell the installer to use “grub2” instead of “grub2-efi”. Then make other changes, such as from where you want it to boot.

Hmm, I don’t think I have tested this procedure with Leap. But I have tested it with 13.2 and I think I have tested it with Tumbleweed.

#6

It would appear that on Jun 10, gogalthorp did say:

> If you want MBR then you must tell the BIOS to boot the DVD in MBR mode.
> The DVD boots in either mode but the BIOS is what does the boot.

Yeah, I wound up doing that very thing. Though when I look at the boot order the efi
section is marked as disabled. But if I select the “CD” device listed in the legacy
section of the boot menu it works…

It would appear that on Jun 11, nrickert did say:

> jtwdyp;2781555 Wrote:
> > Or more to the point, If I blow by that warning will I be able to get
> > the installer
> > to cooperate with installing it’s boot loader to the root partition?
>
> Yes.
>
> But, to do this, you must have done all of the partitioning before the
> install. Otherwise the installer will switch to GPT partitioning.
>
> It’s okay to tell the partitioner to format, but do not allow it to
> change the partitions (other than formatting).
>
> When you get to the summary screen, click on “Booting” (or similar).
> Tell the installer to use “grub2” instead of “grub2-efi”. Then make
> other changes, such as from where you want it to boot.
>
> Hmm, I don’t think I have tested this procedure with Leap. But I have
> tested it with 13.2 and I think I have tested it with Tumbleweed.

Yeah, Once I got the bios to use legacy methods to boot from the DVD it all fell in
to place. And I always prefer to do my own partitioning and formatting… That is to
say I let Gparted do it. :wink: I told it to put grub2 on the root partition. And I
set the extended partition check box too.

Anyway it worked. And I can boot it now, both directly grom my grub legacy boot
partition, AND it also works to chainload the root partition for a grub2 boot.

Now all I have to do is rebuild my user environment…

But thank you all for the good advise.

–
JtWdyP