Hi folks. I get the feeling that my computer could be suffering from a build-up missteps during the installation of successive versions of openSUSE. After installing openSUSE Leap 15.3 on the 2nd of June, my computer simply would not boot, but the strange thing is that I’m fairly sure it booted perfectly normally once or twice on the new 15.3 install before it my computer started refusing to boot. I noticed this thread which sounds similar to my issue but, like I said, it could also be a consequence of me making simple mistakes whilst installing previous versions of openSUSE. Similar to the user in the linked thread, the computer ran Windows well enough (as well as openSUSE 15.2), but after installing openSUSE15.3, the system began to lock up completely whilst booting. My computer was locking up before I even got to the GRUB menu where I could choose between OpenSUSE or Windows 7. My initial thought was that, despite doing nothing other than wiping the Linux partitions on the Linux HDD and leaving the Windows HDD untouched (which is just what I do in order to keep the process as simple as possible) I might have still managed to get something wrong again, so I thought I should begin collecting any information which I thought might be relevant so I could ask about it here. I figured the easiest piece of information to find would be the Q Code on the motherboard which was “A2”. I looked up what that meant on the manufacturer’s site, and it said that A2 indicates some kind of error with boot devices. Because of this, I decided to simply unplug a HDD from the motherboard, and see if the computer would boot, so I disconnected the power and data cable to the Linux HDD, and Windows 7 booted without a hitch. I wanted to make sure this wasn’t a fluke and that it would continue to work like this, so I spent a few days using nothing but Windows, and it continued to work perfectly fine. Because Windows worked consistently for a few days, I thought the problem must be related to the other HDD, so I reconnected it and turned the computer back on with the expectation that it’d just make the computer lock up before I could get into the BIOS, but it didn’t. Because I managed to get into the BIOS, I set the Linux HDD to be first in the HDD boot priority, but whilst I was doing that, I noticed another unexpected entry in my list of possible boot partitions.
I’ve managed to have openSUSE 15.3 boot successfully a few times today, but I’m thinking I should probably get some help with regards to getting rid of these boot partitions or whatever they are, which seem to be collecting on my disks. I think one of them might be from a time where I fouled things up by not realising I’d selected a legacy install for openSUSE, when Windows 7 was installed in UEFI mode. As mentioned above, the current install attempt seems to have created two boot partitions for linux: one labeled openSUSE and the other called something like “Other OS”.
Are there any commands I can run which will provide some useful information about my partitions on both HDDS, rather than me just waffing on about half remembered things from years ago? Like on my Windows HDD, for example, there’s an openSUSE bootloader entry which has been there for years and it points to nothing—and I’ve no idea how it got there or how to remove it. Surely this kind of clutter could be causing my computer to have problems starting up?
Of course I thought to try fdisk -l, but that doesn’t show anything about all the entries for booting. here’s it’s output:
home:~ # fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sdb: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model: TOSHIBA DT01ACA1
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: B42A699F-07C7-4E19-80EB-01BCFAA04E0B
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sdb1 2048 1026047 1024000 500M EFI System
/dev/sdb2 1026048 626995199 625969152 298.5G Linux filesystem
/dev/sdb3 626995200 1920870399 1293875200 617G Linux filesystem
/dev/sdb4 1920870400 1953525134 32654735 15.6G Linux swap
Disk /dev/sda: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
Disk model: ST2000DM001-1ER1
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 78959F4C-F459-43EC-8814-2F7603CE3C9D
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 1023999 1021952 499M EFI System
/dev/sda2 1024000 1286143 262144 128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda3 1286144 3907028991 3905742848 1.8T Microsoft basic data
I’ll post a photograph of the boot options which appear in my BIOS tomorrow, to show how they differ from the output of fdisk.
Any help/advice on cleaning up my system’s boot process would be greatly appreciated.
