No active partion

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi there I was wondering how do u activate a partion? I been tryin for some time now to get open suse to run from hard disk.
It seems everytyhing is installed but when I restated I got now some message about no active partion.
Thx in advance for any tips.

2

Please try following this
HowTo Boot into openSUSE when it won’t Boot from the Grub Code on the Hard Drive

This assumes you used a DVD to install not a live cd

If you used a live cd
come back to me

3

I used the live CD darn :slight_smile:

4

Are there any other operating systems installed (eg; windows)

5

No nothing else on it this is a Open Suse stand alone so I can get used to it. I even went so far as to write all 0’s on the HD to make sure there are no windows conflicts because at my first atempt to marry the two I screwed up my gaming rig :).

6

Re-install and make sure to set the grub bootloader to MBR
During install setup you get a summary like this: http://files.myopera.com/carl4926/albums/671478/15.png

Click the section that says Booting.

You will arrive here: http://files.myopera.com/carl4926/albums/671478/17.png
Now click the ‘Bootloader Installation Tab’
You will arrive here: http://files.myopera.com/carl4926/albums/671478/19.png
Make sure ONLY ‘Boot from Master Boot Record’ is checked then OK it

proceed with install

7

cant i just use Yast2 to do that ?

8

no doesnt work damit :slight_smile: it says error because of partioning

9

Are you in the live desktop?
Open a terminal and type: su
hit enter a couple of times and type:

fdisk -l

post result

10

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80054059008 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9732 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xb2147e2c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 262 2104483+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 263 2873 20972857+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3

11

If you re-install and at this screen: http://files.myopera.com/carl4926/albums/671478/8.png
choose Partition Based
then at this screen choose the first option http://files.myopera.com/carl4926/albums/671478/9.png
allow it to use the whole HD and do default partitioning then make sure to do the MBR setting I showed earlier

Another option is to format the entire disk with Parted Magic to ext3
Downloads - Parted Magic
Then try again

12

well I will try again tommorow thx for the tips, I think the MBR is something I havent tryed before so fingers crossed :). If I find this Forum again I will post the results here. Thx for showing me how to use the terminal was a first.

13

Whoah! why not try to boot it with Super Grub Disk. It’s only a 3 Mbyte download for the iso and burn that to a CD → boot → select to boot installed Linux.

14

I didn’t like the look of the fdisk in post #10?

15

If everything is installed ok on sda2 and you want to mark it as active/boot, then use either GParted or TestDisk on the Parted Magic CD to do so.

16

I see your point. Bit grim, but could be a bad copy/paste. Anyway, the grub CD attempt is almost trivial to do. And if it’s a broken filesystem – soon know that.

17

Where does this message come from? The BIOS?

A strange but true fact is that some BIOSes are picky. They will not boot from the HD if none of the partitions have the bootable flag turned on.

You do this using fdisk, which can be run from a rescue CD like GParted.

18

Ok, the tip with MBR worked, seems that when nothing is on the HD, no MBR at all that you need to install one so after I ran the install again and then selectet Boot from MBR option which is not that easy to find :)it booted fine. So now I need to get used to Yet Another System Tool.

Thanks for the tips so far I am sure I will be back with more questions sooner then later lol. rotfl!

19

Great News and thanks for letting us know;)