I am trying to find someone who has a Hewlett-Packard Z420 workstation with a dual operating system, windows10 and opensuse leap 15.2 The motherboard is the newer UEFI type.
Yesterday Windows 10 recovery actually ended up destroying the software on the first hard drive making recovery impossible, so I now have two harddrives waiting to be scrubbed to the bare metal then reformatted for OS installation.
If you have been able to successfully install openSuse onto a Z420 workstation in the UEFI environment, please reply to this post. Right now I have NOTHING on the system and it cannot even boot from a USB stick. My goal is to get both Windows 10 and openSuse Leap 15.2 operational under the UEFI environment.
Hi and welcome to the Forum
Sounds like you need to go into the system BIOS (F10 on boot) and see what is configured, full UEFI, CSM UEFI etc. Is USB Boot enabled. Or did you press F9 to get to the Boot menu and select the USB device?
What is your partitioning plan, two disks, two efi partitions, disks both set to type gpt?
The firmware is changable, from UEFI boot to legacy boot and I am familiar with those settings. Trying the USB device through F9 is NOT working as advertised, either legacy BIOS or UEFI method, either using the front USB slot (USB2) or the rear USB slot.
I can boot Knoppix 8.6 via the CD on the front.
My plan is to dedicate disk 1 /sdb to window10 and it already was partitioned for Windows 10 including the UEFI partition /boot/efi
disk 2 /sda will be dedicated to opensuse Leap 15.2 (eventually 15.3) and it is btfs file system. I have a 32 gig swap file space planned
Do I need both drives partitioned as GPT? I am guessing yes
Do I need two EFI partitions? I am guessing yes (already have 1 on /sdb)
I will read up on setting disks to type gpt
Hewlett-Packard supported the HP Z420 workstation for both Windows and Linux and even had driver install CD’s to prep the workstation, but checking the HP.com website now leads to dead ends (apparently this workstation has passed its service life)
Should I clean up the windows drive, leave the partitions in place, but remove all files?
I tried to use Windows10 recovery but the system actually ate itself into obvilion attempting to heal itself.
I am having trouble obtaining the 9 gig DVD disk, although I do have a usb stick with Windows 10 install, but I cannot seem to be able to boot this usb stick from the workstation no matter how hard I try in either legacy or UEFI mode
The problem was really subtle. Microsoft Media Installer put the install software on the USB drive, but it was a fat32 drive type. I found that this was the source of the problems as some files > 4.2 gigs on the iso image. Reformatting the usb stick to ntfs file system and allowing MS Media builder to rebuild again cured the problem, the USB stick booted right away on the Z420 system and did the UEFI install including setting the secure boot flags as expected.
I had to strip drive 1 down to raw bare unformatted but the partition table as “gpt” type, and the MS Windows 10 installer knew what to do as a first time install.
Now, I am facing the 2nd task, which is to install openSuse Leap 15.2 on the second drive which is unformatted, but I do have the partition table set to “gpt”
Will the install disk do this correctly? Will the boot loader see both OSs?
The install is close to the end (97% or so) but has stalled out. Here is the text posted to the screen:
Performing Installation
Actions performed.
Creating list of finish scripts to call…
Copy files to installed system
Copying files to installed system…
Moving to installed system…
Save configuration
Setting up linker cache…
Calling step save_config_finish…
Saving default systemd target…
Initializing default window manager…
Saving file system configuration…
Saving ISCSI configuration…
Saving fcoe configuration…
Updating kernel module dependencies…
Copy X Window System configuration into system…
Saving proxy configuration…
Calling step driver_update1_finish…
Saving system settings…
Save installation settings
Writing YaST configuration…
Saving network configuration…
Writing Firewall Configuration…
Saving hardware configuration…
Writing Users Configuration…
Writing automatic configuration…
Writing specific role configuration…
Adapting system services…
Setting default target and system services…
Saving the software manager configuration…
At this point the system stalls at 97% complete and very slow transfer rates from some download site occur.
data rate is as low at 3 bytes/sec but system has been stuck in this stage for over an hour now.
Does anyone know what is going on and why download speeds have dropped to single bytes per second speed?
I do NOT want to abort this install being so close to finishing, yet agonizing slow to finish.
Answer:
The system does default to secure boot. Things appear to be normal now.
I have noticed while doing software updates that http://download.opensuse.org is running very very slowly, sometimes single digit bytes per second. Not sure why this download site is so slow?
Hi
Well it’s controlled via mirrorbrain, so may be getting pointed to a stale mirror. Plus the mirrors are syncing at the moment for Tumbleweed snapshot release 20210320. Maybe just things overloaded…
Perhaps, but I had to bring up Windows10 to get into this forum, as I encountered all kinds of problems on the linux side with stale TLS handshakes and timeouts.
When booting the system, it stalled on network script handoff and that was it. I had to do a manual reset of AC power to break out and recover. I think this is perhaps an oversight in the startup script and someone needs to put a timer on that loop, so the user doesn’t fall into a never-ending spin cycle.
