I have a home built desktop with several linux OS’s installed. i recently replaced 13.2 with LEAP 42.2 via downloaded DVD. Immediately after installation, LEAP 42.2 appeared at the top of the boot menu but some distros weren’t listed. I changed the top of the boot menu back to what it was before LEAP 42.2 installation (Mint 18) but then LEAP 42.2 was absent from the boot menu. ‘fdisk -l’ shows LEAP installed where I placed it (/dev/sda15).
I don’t have a separate /boot partition. All help will be appreciated.
How did you that? Chances are that you now see a GRUB screen installed by another distro (Mint?) and that doesn’t recognize the btrfs setup of Leap.
If so, use the install DVD to boot the newly installed Leap 42.2.
Once there, launch Yast Bootloader, make sure that in the “Bootloader Options” tab the “Probe Foreign OS” checkbox is ticked and press OK.
You might possibly reinstall GRUB from openSUSE Leap if you meet errors by doing the above.
If still no joy, please be more specific as to what distros do not show on the menu and what filesystem they use for /root.
Note also if you mix boot methods (EFI and MBR) you will not e able to cain between OS that use different methods. All OS must use the same method to chain or you must use the UEFI boot selector
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Thank you very much gogalthorp. I followed your directions and they worked like a charm. I’m now booting from LEAP 42.2 and all of my distros are recognized. I feel rather foolish that perhaps everything was fine after the original installation of LEAP 42.2 because the boot menu only shows up to 5 distros on the first page and I didn’t arrow down to see if all of the distros were there.
Is there a way that I can ensure that LEAP 42.2 remains at the top of the boot menu? Thanks again for your help.
When you install a new distro, normally that distro installs also its own bootloader and ensures to take “the default bootloader place”.
To keep Leap in the default place do the following when installing another distro:
install the distro BUT choose to “NOT INSTALL ANY BOOTLOADER”;
the installer will likely complain that “your system will be unbootable” or similar: ignore that;
reboot and CHOOSE to boot from Leap 42.2;
once there launch Yast Bootloader and rebuild the bootloader like you have just done: the bootloader refreshed by Leap should find and list your newly installed distro;
reboot, look for your new distro and boot from it.
Generally speaking, avoid updating, upgrading or re-installing any bootloader from other distros if you want to keep Leap in the top line.