I installed openSUSE using openSUSE-Tumbleweed-NET-i586-Snapshot20170104-Media.iso.
The computer has a Windows 7 partition, which correctly started using grub2 after the installation.
Today, I used online-update to update the kernel. After this, the Windows section is not contained
in the bootloader menu. Windows can be started by pressing “c” in the menu and entering the
commands set root=…; chainloader +1; boot. However, it is not clear to me, how to restore
the bootloader menu with the Windows section. I appreciate some help with this.
A related problem appeared in Yast. I installed grub, since it has simpler configuration of the boot
menu. I expected that after this, Yast bootloader configuration allows to switch between grub2 and
grub. However, “grub” did not appear in the choice menu for the bootloader. So, I used the editor
of /etc/sysconfig in Yast to change grub2 to grub. This seemed OK, since grub is among the
available options and I saved this change in Yast Editor. The change can be seen in the file
/etc/sysconfig/bootloader as expected. However, bootloader configuration in Yast then reports an
unsupported bootloader. May be, I did not install all components of grub, however, no dependencies
were reported. Can you suggest a way, how to switch from grub2 to grub in openSUSE?
Your best approach in opensuse is to stick with grub 2 and add your windows menuentry into the ‘90_persistent’ section of grub.cfg.
I can’t remember the exact layout of windows entry but you can google it. It’s similar to what you are putting in manually.
Despite what it says in the first line of grub.cfg you edit the file directly, make sure 90_persistent is executable in /etc/grub.d and then run
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
You need to su or sudo for all of this of course and you end up with the extra line at the end of grub menu that you can choose. Also the entry is automatically copied over unchanged each time mkconfig is run.
Oh, I almost missed. This is your first post so welcome to the forum.
However, bootloader configuration in Yast then reports an
unsupported bootloader.
That’s correct, support for grub legacy was dropped from YaST quite a while back. It should still be supported on lower level though (like adding/removing menu item when installing/removing kernel). But you need to create initial menu.lst manually.
Thank you for your reply. The problem is solved for now as follows. After changing the bootloader to “grub”,
running Yast with an error message, changing the bootloader back to “grub2” and running Yast again to
configure bootloader menu, the original menu containing windows section is restored.
A question is, whether it is possible to prevent online update to change the bootloader menu, when the
kernel is updated.
No grub hast to be reinitialized to show the new kernel and such. .
Be sure that Windows is always shut down and not hibernated. Which can make the Windows FS invisible to Linux. If running Win 8+ be sure that fast boot is off since it a kind of hibernation
In this case I don’t know why os-prober missed Windows partition on update it certainly seldom happens if Windows file system is healthy
Windows were shut down, I do not use hibernation. The problem can be that there are several partitions
with the same system (this is a temporary state during installation of a new hard drive (/dev/sda) before
reformatting the previous one (/dev/sdb). The output of os-prober is