Just shifted my system over to an ASUS P5K-e motherboard. I have been running 12.1 with the drive in the system (it is loaded and seems to run fine after boot). When I turn on the system the board posts, then it says ‘no drives found’, the screen then says ‘checking NVRAM’, and then the system immediately goes to the dual boot menu and all proceeds fine (I am sending this off the system).
I would like to get this cleared up, although it does run through and boots. I searched the forum and found nothing. Any suggestions as to the problem?? The drive also appears when I go to the bios. Maybe a bios set-up problem??
Run and do the same for this bash script. There is an even bigger bash script you can run here if the first two find nothing, this terminal (copy line below and paste into a terminal session) command downloads and runs the script:
You would need to post its large results here: SUSE Paste, and give us a link to look at in your next message.
I can say that improper disk boot setup or a mixup of GPT and MBR disks where you are looking to boot GPT and only a MBR boot is found, but the info should point to a problem. In the mean time I have a big write on disk types you should read through.
Thanks for the reply and offer of help. Here is the output of the fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 159.5 GB, 159505014784 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19392 cylinders, total 311533232 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
Disk identifier: 0x6c0b6c0b
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 63 156348663 78174300+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 * 156350462 311531519 77590529 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 294758400 311531519 8386560 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 156350464 198289407 20969472 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 198291456 294744063 48226304 83 Linux
I’ll do some research on how to run the findgrub bash script, and will provide results as soon as I figure it out (hopefully tomorrow)… Also will do some reading on partition setup - interesting subtleties everywhere!!
Oh, forgot to mention. I currently have dual boot with Windows, but my plan is to move to only SUSE in the near future. I am currently on 12.1 which has gone off support, so I will probably shift over to 12.3 when that is available and stable (weeks, months ??), or maybe 12.2. If the disk is better left to be formatted and partitioned properly at that point, please let me know - I can live with this for a while with little to no trouble.
Yes, I understand that is the spec. Unfortunately, I have had an impossible time updating through YAST for the last month or so. Opened a thread on the forum, changed my repository update selections, and got one time (update) relief - now things are locked up again. Maybe the repositories are shifting around in prep for the 12.3 release. I don’t know, but if I can’t access updates then there are effectively no updates. This has been a bit of a disappointment to me, especially since the update process through YAST has been extremely effective and easy. Dying on schedule is fine, but dying early is unfortunate. Could be just me having the problem.
openSUSE is installed on an extended partition and this will only work if the Grub Boot Loader is loaded into your MBR (Master Boot Record).
You appear to have the loaded Grub into the Extended Partition which is not a standard partition at all, but can work with openSUSE, but not recommended in my opinion.
The Windows boot manager will not understand having an Extended Partition marked as bootable and if you use the Windows Partition editor, it will muck up this setup.
I am not sure what openSUSE would do by default, but for only four partitions you did not need an Extended Partition, in a Windows dual boot I would load Grub into the MBR and if you do this, you can leave the Windows Partition as active.
Well, I used the partition manager on the distro disk, but it sounds like a made a bit of a hash of it. It sounds like the best approach is to correctly install 12.3 or 12.2. I will read the partition guide provided, and hopefully will not be led astray by the partition manager when I install. Without Windows things will probably be more straightforward. I guess I am lucky the current install works as well as it does…
Can I install directly onto this disk as a fresh install, or is there some cleaning/formatting that should be done to tidy up this mess. It would be unfortunate if the installer had trouble interpreting the wealth of mucked up partitions…
You are going to wait a couple of days to get openSUSE 12.3, that is for sure. Using Custom Partitioning I would remove sda2, sda5, sda6 & sda7 then create the following setup.
Device Boot System Partition Boot Comment
/dev/sda Load Grub into MBR Primary
/dev/sda1 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT Prim Primary * 80 GB or less, Can come back and make it bootable when Grub is in MBR and Windows Service Packs will load in marked Active
/dev/sda2 Linux swap / Solaris Primary 2 GB New Swap
/dev/sda3 Linux / (root) Primary New / root & Try for 34 GB
/dev/sda4 Linux /home Primary Rest of Disk or 44 GB
After removing everything but /dev/sda1, its time to fix Windows if you want, but don’t try after you reload openSUSE. The NTFS partition can still be used for openSUSE if you want as they work fine with Linux, or blow it away and reduce all partition numbers by one. I do dual boot with Windows and it works OK if you want that.
On 03/11/2013 05:46 PM, rogerh113 wrote:
>
> Well, I used the partition manager on the distro disk, but it sounds
> like a made a bit of a hash of it. It sounds like the best approach is
> to correctly install 12.3 or 12.2. I will read the partition guide
> provided, and hopefully will not be led astray by the partition manager
> when I install. Without Windows things will probably be more
> straightforward. I guess I am lucky the current install works as well
> as it does…
>
> Can I install directly onto this disk as a fresh install, or is there
> some cleaning/formatting that should be done to tidy up this mess. It
> would be unfortunate if the installer had trouble interpreting the
> wealth of mucked up partitions…
Not all the info you got is correct. I never install GRUB into the MBR - I leave
the standard Microsoft code there. What that means is that I put the GRUB code
into the partition that contains /, EXCEPT when / is one a logical partition.
In that case, it goes into the extended partition, AND my preferred setup is
pretty much what you got.
Why do I do it that way? I usually have two different systems on my hard drive.
To switch from one to the other as the primary boot, just change the active
partition. It is that simple.
Your system looks like one set up using legacy GRUB.
If you have a windows XP you may delete it, if you don’t really need it, because it soon reaches the end of support.
Otherwise, the 2 Linux partitions could be root (or /) and /home.
In that case, installing openSUSE 12.3 you could format root (or /),
but there wouldn’t be a need to format /home, although it would be useful to delete most invisible files and folders in there,
except for /.thunderbird, and the like.
An advice: write down the sequence of partitions and their sizes on a sheet of paper before starting the installer.
When the installer is running you no longer have direct acces to your original setup !
So if you want to prevent the installer from deleting partitions or altering the size of existing partitions,
you need to know your original partition setup.
Further, if you’re using legacy GRUB now, it would probably be simpler to use legacy GRUB under 12.3 as well,
for which you will probably have to ask for explicitly during the installation process.
Still you could go on with 12.1 for a while - I’m quite happy with it !
A remark on a point in your 1st posting:
I use a quite recent ASUS motherboard myself as well,
and like you, I as well see a message ‘no drives found’ at every startup.
But with respect to my motherboard (ASUS-P8H67-V) I do well know the cause of that:
My board still has an IDE plug (for ‘old fashioned’ hard disks or other ‘old’ hardware),
which I wanted, but which I don’t use until present, on the other hand.
Now at every startup the motherboard/BIOS looks if any device is attached to the IDE bus.
If it doesn’t find any IDE device, it nicely tells me ‘no drives found’.
Long story short ?
In the end it’s nice that I get to know whether any IDE devices are connected, isn’t it ?
Thanks for the information on the IDE drive - there is indeed one on my motherboard. It is useufl to know that I can expect to see the ‘no drives found’, unless I install on an IDE drive (which I do have one). The Windows is of no use to me - I had it only so I could use a car repair CD, and it turns out the CD will only run on 512MB or less memory. I have set up a small ITX computer for that purpose, so my main computer can be dedicated to linux.
I will note the existing partitions and suggestions. Since I will be doing a fresh install, can the partition tool just reformat and use the entire disk as it sees fit? It sounds like some hands on partitioning might be required.
I also am happy with 12.1, and may continue for a while. I will see if the repository issue clears in the next week or so - that is the primary driver for me to upgrade.
I also like this approach for the exact same reason noted. As long as one is careful to keep grub OFF of the MBR, then instead of struggling with restoring grub from MBR, as you note it is a simple task of partition management.
I confess for the longest time, I had read this of method (keep Grub OFF of MBR and use active partition management) in the past, but I never truely understood what the posts were talking about, until I ran the ‘findgrub’ script of please_try_again, which displayed in simplistic terms how the MBR and various code in the partitions pointed to the boot locations. Only at that time did it become clear to me what was being talked about … and it was almost a revelation the way it lifted some of the mystery fog around my limited understanding of the boot management wrt partitioning.
