Hello everyone I hope some one can help. I tried to install opensuse 11.0 from the cd. Everything was going fine untill an error reported that it could not install dev/sda5. I can boot into vista with no problems. I checked to see If the drive had been shrunk to use with opensuse and it is, but when I boot I do not see the grup menu. What do I do?
Laptop specs are:
Vista Home premium
HP HDX
Intel T81
4gb ram
Nvidia 8800m gts
Can you still boot from the Live-CD? If so, boot from it, open a terminal window, do the following and post back the output:
su
fdisk -l -u
lspci
Here is the log:
linux@linux:~> su
linux:/home/linux # fdisk -l -u
Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xc2deb5a2
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 63 359743606 179871772 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 596911140 625137344 14113102+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 359743607 596911139 118583766+ f W95 Ext’d (LBA)
/dev/sda5 359743608 363952574 2104483+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Partition table entries are not in disk order
linux:/home/linux # lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f3)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HEM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATAAHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8800M GTS (reva2)
02:06.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 05)
02:06.1 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 22)
02:06.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller (rev 12)
02:06.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter(rev 12)
02:06.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev ff)
10:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN Network Connection (rev 61)
20:00.0 Mass storage controller: Silicon Image, Inc. Sil 3531 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 01)
28:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8055 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 13)
Your partition table looks strange . . . the first primary partition (sda1 on the fdisk report) is ~180GB, I assume for Vista, and looks OK. The second partition in the physical sequence on the disk is an “extended” primary (sda3) of ~120GB; all that is inside of it is a 2GB logical partition (sda5, swap), the remainder is not being used. The last partition (sda2) is ~14GB and is a regular primary partition formatted NTFS.
openSUSE has not been installed, although it looks like the extended was created along with the one logical for swap, and the second NTFS partition was moved to the end of the disk to make room for the extended.
So, what do you have on that second NTFS partition (the last on the disk) of ~14GB? Can the data in it just be moved into the first large partition? If you can do that, then you could just delete that partition and the extended partition, that is, just leave the first partition. (All of the preceding you would do in Vista.) Then when you run the openSUSE install, it will create partitions with the unused space following the first partition. If you wish, after the deletions, Vista can increase the size of that first partition. Bottom line, to avoid a lot of complexity, you want to get your Vista partition(s)/data at the front of the disk, leaving unallocated space to be used by openSUSE.
If you’re unfamiliar with disk partitions and this isn’t clear, don’t hesitate to ask for more detail.
The 14gb space is the Hp recovery partition.
Hmmm . . . You do understand that the recovery system copies back an image of the machine as it left the factory, that is, that such a recovery wipes out everything you have installed and all your data? I mention this only because understanding what this mechanism actually does, sometimes influences what users choose to do with it.
IME what you have is a recovery partition that was placed at the very end of the disk, i.e., there was one extremely large partition followed by the recovery. In the past the recovery images have typically been placed in the first partition, but I have seen manufacturers putting it at the end. Interestingly, the openSUSE installation was apparently smart enough to see this and hence downsized the first partition to provide space for itself without disturbing the recovery partition at the end. Since a PC can only have a maximum of 4 primary partitions, an “extended” type primary had to be created which acts as a container for additional partitions (called “logicals”).
You can approach this now in a couple of ways. The first question is how much space you want to allocate to openSUSE - I doubt it is ~120GB, which is the size of the extended partition container now. So, one method would be to remove the extended partition (with the logical inside it) and then upsize the first Vista partition to whatever you want it to be; Vista will do this for you on-the-fly. You would then have an unused block of space in which to create a new extended primary partition, and inside of it, three openSUSE partitions, one for the root (/), one for /home, and one for swap.
Your other alternative is to build on top of exactly what you have now. In the extended primary there is one logical created so far, for swap. You can add two more, for root and for /home. Unless you make /home enormous, that will leave you with ~70GB unused space in which you could create an additional linux partition for openSUSE user data, or you could (after install) use Vista to create an additional partition for Windows (or shared Windows/linux) user data, or you could divide the space and have both.
While the second alternative may sound more straightforward, working with what you already have, the downside is that there is some risk in creating inter-leaving partitions with more than one operating system. It would actually be cleaner to use the first method, getting in place exactly what you want for Windows first, even using Windows to create the extended and logical partitions for openSUSE (openSUSE would format them, but not physically create them on the disk).
How do you want to approach this? Once we know, we can provide specific instructions on how to go about it.
The first approach sounds good but I am a novice at this. I have used computers for many years but lack the skill it takes get this correct. So your help would be great!
I took the plunge and finally got opensuse to install so I just wanted to say thank you for all of your help. If you are a reflection of this communities helpfullness, then I feel I have made a great choice for my first plunge into the linux world.
Of course another problem came up after installation but that is for another thread!
Glad you worked through the installation.
And you are quite welcome. Thanks for the kind thought. 