I was running openSUSE 12.1 on a Supermicro 1U server. I took openSUSE-12.3-DVD-x86_64.iso and burned it to a USB flash drive and booted from it. I got the Welcome screen and then the choices screen. These looked fine. I picked installation. After a long time of hardware detection I got the Preparation > Welcome Screen, which was being displayed at 640x480x87 with a lot of jitter. I don’t know why it chose the 87 Hz refresh rate; that seems too fast for my Dell LCD panel. I hit enter for the license agreement, and it moved to the System Analysis page, and seemed to hang on the “Searching for Linux partitions…” (60%) step. I powered off the system and powered on again. This time I picked 1600x1200 from the Video menu, but on proceeding to Preparation > Welcome I got the same 87Hz refresh. I also let it search for a really long time for Linux partitions, and it did eventually make further progress, but I’ve never seen an openSUSE upgrade be so slow and never had the video trouble before. Right now “Partition or System to Update” it is showing no choices until I checked Show All Partitions. This is definitely not working as smoothly as it once did.
The 1U system has four 750 GB drives with /boot and / being mirrored RAID1 arrays (there are also RAID6 and RAID5 partitions if this matters).
Any suggestions on how to manage the video for the install process would be most appreciated. Any comments on why the upgrade is not as smooth as it once was would be interesting.
To make matters worse, at the end of the upgrade, it said Error occurred while installing GRUB. GNU GRUB version 0.97. [Minimal BASH-like line…] grub> setup --stage2 /boot/grub/stage2 --force-lba (hd0) (hd0,1)
Checking if “/boot/grub/stage1” exists… no
Checking if “/grub/stage1” exists… no
Error 15: File not found
grub> quit
On 2013-04-12 03:56, gogalthorp wrote:
> To the rest I cam’t say but since you chose old grub intead of grub2
> you do need to be careful how thing are set
If he selected “upgrade” the choice of grub 1 would be automatic.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
On 2013-04-12 06:36, gogalthorp wrote:
>
> He is also jumping from 12.1 to 12.3 which may be a factor. Personally
> I’s be very sure that the the installer was doing what I expect it to
> do.
Yes, it is a factor. The upgrade is possible, but a DVD upgrade can not
upgrade what is not in the DVD. The rest of the packages are either left
not upgraded or uninstalled, so you have things to do afterwards, and
with a jump the leftovers are from more different version than normal.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
On 2013-04-12 19:58, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> On 2013-04-12 06:36, gogalthorp wrote:
>>
>> He is also jumping from 12.1 to 12.3 which may be a factor. Personally
>> I’s be very sure that the the installer was doing what I expect it to
>> do.
>
> Yes, it is a factor. The upgrade is possible, but a DVD upgrade can not
> upgrade what is not in the DVD. The rest of the packages are either left
> not upgraded or uninstalled, so you have things to do afterwards, and
> with a jump the leftovers are from more different version than normal.
Thank you for the note about the floppy. That may be it, as the machine lacks a floppy drive. I will check the BIOS.
As someone else pointed out, GRUB was picked by the upgrade process. I have since attempted a fresh install (leaving the data partitions, and reformatting /boot and /) with GRUB2. That did not work either, as I ran into GRUB2 needing a “BIOS boot partition” with GPT. Apparently GPT worked with openSUSE 12.1 on my old system (a Tyan K8S, about vintage 2005), but no longer does. I am going to attempt to tar my data partitions to a USB disk and then revert to MBR, as I don’t know how to create a BIOS boot partition without disturbing the existing data partitions.
I do have a suggestion for the developers: how about checking if a BIOS boot partition is required and non-existant earlier in the process? It is unfortunate to go through a long install to have it fail at the last step.
Thank you again all for your suggestions. If you have any further suggestions, they will be appreciated.
Unfortunately the upgrade attempt the system non-bootable, so some of that is hard to get at the moment. I also tried running both the LIVE GNOME and LIVE KDE systems to help backup the system, but both failed. I am currently running a Live Fedora 18 and running tar of each of the 4 partitions before starting over with a MBR setup (if you have other suggestions, let me know).
I think this is the mobo: tomcatK8S_spec and I am using the integrated graphics (ATI® RAGE™ XL 8MB PCI graphics controller).
The original disk partitioning was done with the openSUSE 12.1 installation DVD using GPT and creating four type 83 and one type 82 partitions, so I think parted output is more appropriate than fdisk output. I will try to get that to you when I am finished with the backup. I have it on the screen, but I doubt I could type it here without errors, so it will have to wait until cut-and-paste is possible (many hours). Basically the first partition (/boot) is 525MB (RAID1,ext4), the second (/) is 64GB (RAID1,ext4), the third is 16GB of swap, the fourth is 268G (RAID6,ext4), and the fifth is 400GB (RAID5,ext4). The first partition starts at 1049kB according to parted. The first and second partitions have both the boot and legacy_boot flags shown in parted.
The BIOS says it is Phoenix on boot. I very much doubt that it is UEFI.
All I know is that I picked GPT partitioning when installing openSUSE 12.1. Perhaps it picked hybrid on my behalf? I had never heard of hybrid partitioning until the 12.3 upgrade failed and I started reading about GPT booting.