Help - I am trying to install opensuse on an IBM 8188 desktop with a single SATA hdd. The software appears to load just fine… standard install but when I reboot the box … believing it should just boot from the hard drive I get the message no OS installed. I’ve adjusted the bios and the drive order and I have changed to install parameters for APC or APIC… you know what I mean… does’nt matter NO JOY IN MUD VILLE.
Please help…
Help - I am trying to install opensuse on an IBM 8188 desktop with a single SATA hdd. The software appears to load just fine… standard install but when I reboot the box … believing it should just boot from the hard drive I get the message no OS installed. I’ve adjusted the bios and the drive order and I have changed to install parameters for APC or APIC… you know what I mean… does’nt matter NO JOY IN MUD VILLE.
Please help…
How many hard drives does this PC have? BY default, openSUSE would install the boot loader into the MBR of the first physical disk and would not know if you have designated a different drive to boot. The error message you got most often means that the active boot partition from the designated boot drive in your BIOS has no OS installed into it. Without knowing the total picture, as in number of hard drives, we will be unable to tell you what to do next. In Linux, drives are numbered in order they are found based on the hardware configuration. Hard Disk one would be called sda, while hard disk 2 would be called sdb and so forth. If you designated sdb as the boot drive in your BIOS and did not know to point the openSUSE installation to sdb, then by default, it would install onto sda, even if you never boot from sda or if you intended to start booting from sdb after you installed openSUSE and there are other complications. So, we need to know the full hard drive story on this PC.
Thank You,
robertmoody151, Welcome to openSUSE and the forum.
The software appears to load just fine… standard install
What version e.g. 11.3? 64bit or 32bit version? 64bit or 32bit hardware? KDE or Gnome desktop? What install method - liveCD/DVD/network CD? Are you dual booting with a version of Windows installed?
Thank you both for your help. I will try to answer the questions asked of me by both responders.
I’m trying to install OpenSuse 11.3. 32bit software and 32bit hardware. The is a single harddrive, a Maxtor 300GB SATA. I’m running the install program from the DVD I burned from the site… It is set for automatic configuration. This will not be a dual boot system. I am trying to build a true Linux box… Desktop is KDE.
As stated above, there is a single Maxtor 300GB SATA harddrive. Linux has configured the drive to have 5 partitions. The harddrive looks as follows:
SDA
\DEV\SDA1 Boot
\DEV\SDA2 Extended Partition
\DEV\SDA3 Root Volume
\DEV\SDA4 Home
\DEV\SDA5 SWAP
From what you two have shared and what I see above, it appears that the computer is not picking up the SDA1 partition, eventhough it is probably seeing the harddrive SDA. Is it possible to create a single 300GB partition so that everything resides in the same location or we can do something so the computer can find SDA1 and boot?
Thanks for your help.
Please post the result of fdisk -l from a su - terminal. See Eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=(http://forums.opensuse.org/english/information-new-users/advanced-how-faq-read-only/451526-posting-code-tags-guide.html#post2267435)
Thanks for your help.
I would love to post the results but the computer does not find an OS to boot or give me a command line to work from. I use the disk and can ESC out of the GUI interface but I can only gain access to a command line through the rescue command. When I do that it asks me for a Rescue Login. I don’t have the ID or the PW so I am dead at this point. If I ESC or CTRL C out of the rescue, the DVD reboots and we start again. I can go through the install process and review the partitions and provide you the information, if you want to tell me exactly what you want to see.
Can you boot it from a liveCD ?
What is a liveCD and where do I get it. I burned the disk I have and I am really out of my element with this. Sorry
What is a liveCD and where do I get it.
This one is worth the download effort, Parted Magic Downloads
Using Parted Magic an Introduction
What is a liveCD
A liveCD is a CD you put in the CD/DVD drive and reboot, it boots to an OS from the CD (not the hard disk)
@robertmoody151, Thanks for the extra information provided.
During the installation process, the installer arrives at a summary screen before committing installing anything. On that screen, you have to decide where to install the Grub bootloader, either to the MBR or to the root partition. For 11.3, I cannot remember the default settings of those displayed options (i.e. enabled or disabled). In your case with no multibooting, you should have had the MBR option enabled, and if the default had both options disabled, you would have needed to enable MBR as the location for the bootloader. Do you recall that setting?
SDA
\DEV\SDA1 Boot
\DEV\SDA2 Extended Partition
\DEV\SDA3 Root Volume
\DEV\SDA4 Home
\DEV\SDA5 SWAP
So The norm is for the Grub Boot loader to go into the MBR. The only issue I see above is that you had to go into the expert Partitioning mode to achieve this setup as openSUSE would not have created a boot partition by default. Since this setup does not work, I would blow it away (Delete it all) in the expert mode and then use a more simple setup like this:
/dev/sda MBR loaded with Grub
/dev/sda1 SWAP Primary Partition
/dev/sda2 / root Primary Partition (Marked Active is OK, but with MBR loaded with Grub this is not required)
/dev/sda3 /home Primary Partition
This is what I would try.
Thank You,
Why is it an “issue”? I and many others have to use custom partitioning whenever I install openSUSE (or other distros). Again your reply implies that there is something wrong with it against some theoretical norm, without suggesting what is wrong. If (?) there is nothing invalid about the partitioning, the installer should cope with it or get fixed.
If you don’t know what your doing using expert mode can lead you to trouble. For a simple install with no other OS then the defaults should be taken unless you have some more complex partitioning scheme in mind. In which case you should understand booting issues (MBR versus partition for grub) and know what you want to accomplish. The OS said they took the defaults but the defaults do not include a separate /boot. So what other non standard option did the take like maybe installing grub to /boot? and maybe have no MBR record at all? All this is possible to do but does not mean it is a good idea unless you have a larger plan in mind.
Why is it an “issue”? I and many others have to use custom partitioning whenever I install openSUSE (or other distros). Again your reply implies that there is something wrong with it against some theoretical norm, without suggesting what is wrong. If (?) there is nothing invalid about the partitioning, the installer should cope with it or get fixed.
Because the resulting disk did not boot consused and there is no need to create a separate /boot partition unless you know why you would do this and the user was not prepared to deal with a busted installation. That is why. It would have been best for a new user to allow the default configuration to work its magic. We are not talking about experienced Linux users here that normally use the expert Partitioning setup. Instead and expending your limited energy dealing with what I have said, why not come up with a solution for our user to use instead?
Thank You,
The custom partitioner comes with a health warning! Do we really need yours as well. The OP clearly had a personal partitioning scheme in mind, and didn’t say the defaults were taken. I often refer to a “standard install” to cover the software included at installation, but not the partitioning because the installer can only make a proposal that is accepted or not (i.e. user choice - there is no standard). BTW, I never accept it because it’s nearly always inappropriate, given existing partitions. My first linux partition on the disk is usually a /boot anyway.
But the user is entitled to have it if he wants one. I have one, and it works every time. 
Plenty of users here use the custom partitioning setup. Perhaps you could instead spend some of your limited energy asking rather than making assumptions about the users’ abilities and what is/isn’t normal?
But the OP seems to have missed the part about where to put grub and did not install a generic MBR. And it is obvious from their post that he/she is not an experienced user and missed the nuance of how to set up the boot code. To me doing a standard install is to take the defaults. It is very true there are many ways to do a partitioning scheme but there are also a lot of ways to do it wrong also.
Yes that’s possible, and why I asked the question to the OP, rather than making any assumptions. Users have been caught before by the default boot loader settings in the installer’s summary. On my recent 11.4 RC1 install, both options were disabled (I definitely had to enable one), and I think it was same on 11.3 but I’m not totally sure about that. Awaiting the OP’s response on that.
When I use the “Rescue Disk” (actually, the “rescue option” on the installation disk boot menu), I use “root” as the id and no password. I am then able to mount partitions, list directories, etc… Am I missing something?