Hi, I just installed openSUSE on an existing partition on my hard drive (/dev/sda7). When I rebooted I found I could no longer boot into Mint or Windows 10. I use rEFInd as my bootloader, and when I select it in the boot loader option (by disabling the openSUSE boot loader, which doesn’t seem to recognise anything but openSUSE) it comes up and shows Windows and openSUSE, but not Mint. Mint is the distro I use to do all my stuff, and contains a lot of information I would prefer not to lose. I don’t know how to get Mint back. Normally rEFInd scans all the efi loaders and dynamically adds a launch icon on its menu, but there is no icon for Mint, so it seems that something has been deleted that shouldn’t have been. I’m hoping it’s just something in the efi partition. However when I display the partitions in gparted it seems to indicate that the Mint partition /dev/sda5 is empty. Can anybody please advise how I can get my Mint partition back?
I am prepared to swear on a stack of bibles I did not touch /dev/sda5 in the install. I did a manual partition and made sure I specified /dev/sda7 for the installation partition. openSUSE found the efi partition and swap partition on its own, so I didn’t have to specify anything there.
All advice gratefully received, especially about how to add images to posts.
Well, I think I’ve clobbered my Mint partition. Had another look at the partitions with openSUSE’s partitioner, (I was using a live Debian USB before), and its mount point is /home. This may explain why, when I mount the partition using the mount command, there is only one directory in it, which is my user id. I guess I can kiss goodbye to several years worth of documents, emails, pictures, downloads, and many other files, a lot of which are irreplaceable. No, I never did backups. But I will from now on.
Thanks openSUSE.
Perhaps the developers could have a look at why the install chose to randomly clobber another partition on the computer it had no business accessing. When I asked it to install in /dev/sda7 that’s what I meant. I did not mean /dev/sda7 and any other random partitions you thought you might like to use as well. Very disappointed. Needless to say openSUSE will not be staying on my computer. I’ll have to reinstall Mint and try and recover as much as I can. But I’ve lost an awful lot.
That is normal /home is the mount point if you just look in a partition you don’t see that just the user directories
If you installed openSUSE in MBR mode and the others are in EFI boot mode then they can not see each other. All OS must boot in the same way ie either MBR or EFI
Thanks for the reply, but I think you have misunderstood my problem. I wanted openSUSE to install itself in ONE partition, which obviously will include /, /boot, /home, /var, /bin etc. This is pretty common practice with modern distros. Even swap can be allocated in the same partition if you want it to (if you want to use swap at all). My point is that I did not want it to install /home in a separate partition, and I did not expressly ask it to do so. It did it anyway, and thereby deleted my entire partition that had Mint installed on it. And it deleted several years of documents, pictures, music, emails, CAD drawings, programs, all sorts of stuff. Stuff that is is basically impossible for me to ever recover.
I also realised I am not the first person this has happened to either. Clearly it has happened before, often enough for there to be a warning and disclaimer in the install documentation that I recalled reading after the event. It was something along the lines of “don’t blame us if you overwrite your wedding photos”. I have to say, after 35 years in the IT business designing and building IT systems for major companies and government departments, that simply putting a “don’t blame me” disclaimer is not a satisfactory solution to the problem. Obviously some changes are required in the install procedure, that it seems to me it would not be terribly difficult to implement. The primary rule should be: do not overwrite a partition that is not empty. Period. This will force the user to manually delete and reallocate, and maybe even format, every partition that he wants the install to use. If that rule was imlementd THEN you can claim it’s not your fault if he/she overwrites his/her wedding photos. And the user can be certain that the install will install the system into the partition(s) he/she wants it installed into. And there will be no more posts like this one on your forums.
I have no formal IT experience but of all the distros I’ve tried I find openSUSE install the most flexible. You have to check what it offers as a default or you can lose your wedding photos but it gives you very clear options of what you may prefer.
I’ve installed openSUSE a few times along side other partitions without any mishaps.
It is good practice to backup any important data before installing any OS. You should also know that the installer gives you the opportunity to check that the partitioning proposal is as you intend before proceeding.
Define a partition setup for openSUSE Leap in this step. The installer creates a proposal for one of the available disks containing a root partition formatted with Btrfs, a swap partition, and a home partition formatted with XFS. On hard disks smaller than 25 GB the proposal does not include a separate home partition. If one or more swap partitions have been detected on the available hard disks, these existing ones will be used (rather than proposing a new swap partition). You have several options to proceed:
Next
To accept the proposal without any changes, click Next to proceed with the installation workflow.Edit Proposal Settings
To adjust the proposal choose Edit Proposal Settings. The pop-up dialog lets you switch to an LVM-based Proposal or an Encrypted LVM-based Proposal. You may also adjust file systems for the proposed partitions, create a separate home partition, and enlarge the swap partition (to enable suspend to disk, for example).
If the root file system format is Btrfs, you can also enable Btrfs snapshots here.
Create Partition Setup
Use this option to move the proposal described above to a different disk. Select a specific disk from the list. If the chosen hard disk does not contain any partitions yet, the whole hard disk will be used for the proposal. Otherwise, you can choose which existing partition(s) to use. Edit Proposal Settings lets you fine-tune the proposal.
Expert Partitioner
To create a custom partition setup choose Expert Partitioner. The Expert Partitioner opens, displaying the current partition setup for all hard disks, including the proposal suggested by the installer. You can Add, Edit, Resize, or Delete partitions.
You can also set up Logical Volumes (LVM), configure software RAID and device mapping (DM), encrypt Partitions, mount NFS shares and manage tmpfs volumes with the Expert Partitioner. To fine-tune settings such as the subvolume and snapshot handling for each Btrfs partition, choose Btrfs. For more information about custom partitioning and configuring advanced features, refer to Book “Reference”, Chapter 5 “Advanced Disk Setup”, Section 5.1 “Using the YaST Partitioner”.
The install partitioner does show what it’s going to do but there is a need to look. If you used the expert mode and told it to install all to sda7 that is what it will do. All is /. If you left some of it’s auto partitioning selections active that’s your problem not it’s.
Actually .using a common /home shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve just done that plus a common /tmp and swap even though currently one of my installs doesn’t use swap. A common /home does need different user names for each install though. /var does need to be separate for each install.
None of this would matter if you had selected to install / to sda7. I’ve been using the install for over 15 years and other than me never ever had a problem with it. As far as I am aware it’s the only one that allows people to partition any way they like via a graphical interface that is easy to use - providing the know what they are doing and aware of what they hope to achieve.
Grub is a pain is some way but will boot a number of installs.It just need it’s reconfiguration utility running after each install. As far as I am aware opensuse’s grub in real terms is no different to anyone else’s.
In short it’s perfectly capable of doing this sort of thing
@OP: You missed the default, which is clearly visible in the installer, i.e. “Have /home on a separate partition”. In all the years I’ve used openSUSE and it’s predecessors as well as other distros, I’ve had to find out the partitioning faults were 100% of the time generated by me myself. Conclusion: never ever do such a thing without backup.
There is a reason for the default: if /home was within the same filesystem, default btrfs with snapshotting on, it would generate huge snapshots.
BTW: Reinstalling Mint is not going to bring back your data.
No, that’s not the reason. Root snapshots only capture root subvolume, the reason for large number of subvolumes is precisely to avoid capturing (presumably, volatile) data in those snapshots. There is no problem making /home separate subvolume as well.
