Hi everyone! I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T520, and was trying to install Leap 42.1 from a live stick onto my harddrive. No dual-booting or anything, just that one OS. The problem is that post-install, I take out the live stick, and then my laptop will refuse to boot from there, and just takes me to the boot order menu. The only way to get it to boot is to reconnect the live stick, wait for THAT to boot, tell it to boot from the hard disk and then continue from there.
Here’s some outputs:
peridot:~ # fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
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: C9B3C98B-1481-4F15-8743-219663DA7551
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 16383 14336 7M BIOS boot
/dev/sda2 16384 4225023 4208640 2G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda3 4225024 25206783 20981760 10G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda4 25206784 976773119 951566336 453.8G Microsoft basic data
Disk /dev/sdb: 7.5 GiB, 8004304896 bytes, 15633408 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x20ca2c8b
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 3780 11339 7560 3.7M ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)
/dev/sdb2 * 11340 9078783 9067444 4.3G 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS`
peridot:~ # blkid
/dev/sda1: PARTLABEL="primary" PARTUUID="94b98031-84de-4499-b048-dea87c8e77b9"
/dev/sda2: UUID="fa7affd4-2a7f-4ec6-a7dc-74d5390839d9" TYPE="swap" PARTLABEL="primary" >PARTUUID="28a1cd48-8e6e-4c56-8f2e-9bf889f9e821"
/dev/sda3: UUID="f064d806-fba5-4eb7-9c78-5381c7969727" TYPE="ext4" PTTYPE="dos" PARTLABEL="primary" >PARTUUID="272f885c-b699-45aa-aba-af7257176893"
/dev/sda4: UUID="d1a53e3d-69d7-4f52-b267-d82fc742b7fb" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="primary" >PARTUUID="fd14d1d5-321d-411d-8fad-72a27293cc86"
/dev/sdb1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" UUID="FDA2-4A52" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="20ca2c8b-01"
/dev/sdb2: UUID="2015-10-29-23-29-08-00" LABEL="openSUSE-Leap-42.1-DVD-x86_64026" TYPE="iso9660" >PARTUUID="20ca2c8b-02"
Please let me know what else is needed to figure out what to do! Any help at all would be appreciated. Thank you!!
I was wondering if you were doing EFI booting with the EFI partition on the USB.
But it is still possible that you are doing EFI booting. Check your BIOS settings. Make sure that you have CSM support enabled and that legacy booting is the preferred method of booting.
Check the boot order settings. Make the internal hard drive first in boot order. You should still be able to boot the USB if you hit F12 during boot (to get a boot menu from the BIOS).
I’ve gotten to the boot order menu, and tried to manually hit the HDD0. It goes blank for a second with a cursor up top left, then it takes me back to the boot menu. Just straight back, like it refuses.
From memory, my boot order is the CD drive, HDD0, the USB drive then the network boot.
Did you boot the installer in MBR mode or EFI if EFI and you changed during the install things may not be set right
In Yast -bootloader see if it is set to grub2 or grub2-efi. Should be grub2 for MBR boot but looks like it made and EFI boot partition but not mounted at /boot/efi so things may be mixed up
Also if sda3 is your root 10 gig is really marginally small if you have BTRFS file system then should be at least 40 gig
Yast bootloader says Boot Loader is Grub2. It is able to boot from MBR and from Root Partition. The filesystem I chose during install is ext4, not btrfs.
If there’s a way to fix this by re-installing and starting again, I will gladly do so. I’ve reinstalled twice now, tweaking this and that but ending with the same problem.
Well 10 gig is small for EXT4 root also for best results 20 gig is a minimum I recommend unless you never intend to install much
Be sure to boot installer in legacy mode and install grub to MBR or better just bite the bullet and go EFI and boot the install in EFI mode. EFI is easier to deal with then MBR once you understand it
You know the installer is in legacy mode if you see option at bottom of the menu screen. No option then EFI mode
From this distance, it looks like a problem with BIOS settings. And if that’s right, then reinstall won’t fix that.
If you hit F12 during boot (while the “welcome” screen is showing), do you get a boot menu? And can you select the hard drive there for booting? And does that then work?
Ok, to reiterate what I’m going to do during a reinstallation.
Go through BIOS and set UEFI as the preferred mode.
Go through installation again, either set the filesystem to btrfs with 40gb allocated for root or ext4 with 20 gb allocated for root.
Once I hit the Verify Installation Settings page, what settings must I make sure is right?
On the other hand, if I boot to legacy mode as I had before, I hit the Verify Installation Settings page and then make sure to install the bootcode to the MBR?
I want to get this exactly right for once, and I’m googling for step-by-step installation procedures to see what I need to make sure is correct to ensure a proper reboot once it happens.
Plan Z is to just live with the fact that I can’t do anything without the live stick connected. Just have a small usb live on the back of my ThinkPad.
When I hit f12 to get to the boot order menu, and I hit HDD0 to boot from, it goes to a blank screen with a cursor for a few seconds, then it immediately goes back to the boot order menu. When I exit out of that, I assume it boots from HDD1, which is the live stick. Then from there, it asks if I want to boot from the hard disk or do an install, and booting from the hard disk works from there.
Did you install grub code to MBR? If you forced a EFI boot install to MBR then you may have missed that since in EFI mode there is no MBR used. Not sure if that can be fixed from Yast but you could do a command line reinstall of grub. Best to boot the installer in the mode you intend to use it knows what to do and it is easy to miss stuff if you try to force a different mode
I installed bootcode to MBR during the install. I haven’t done a grub2-install call yet, but on a prior install (yesterday’s), I ran it to force it to /dev/sda (my harddrive), and that still didn’t work. I don’t know if I forced an EFI boot install.
If you want to install with EFI booting, then you need to boot the installer in UEFI mode. For that, you may need to tell your BIOS to prefer EFI booting.
When installing with UEFI booting, make sure that there is an EFI partition mounted at “/boot/efi”. The partitioner should take care if that if you boot the installer in UEFI mode.
And yes, reinstalling with UEFI booting will probably fix your problem. From the other posts, it looks as if there is something wrong with the boot setup for legacy booting, but I’m not sure what. Either you don’t have boot code in the MBR, or you don’t have the legacy active flag set for your boot partition.
I have a Lenovo ThinkServer, and legacy booting does work on that (though I prefer UEFI booting).
To reiterate before I go down for another installation, first I should change my BIOS settings to prefer UEFI booting, go ahead with the installation.
Then when I hit the disk partition menu, I make sure that there’s an EFI partition mounted at /boot/efi in one of the /dev/sda’s. I’ll probably go with btrfs filesystem with 40 gb in the root at this point as well.
And then continue as normal from there until the install completes, do a reboot and see if it worked. Is that all right?
If you boot installer in EFI then al those things will be default. Note since you already have an install you will have to tell the installer exactly what you want to do with the old partition
