Man, I was really hoping this would not happen. I took great care in the Partitioning section, working from the left side, to designate which partition I wanted to install to. I think it got that right. There were some swap partitions already set up, and I suppose it latched onto one of those as well.
The 1.5 Grub boot process is rather nice looking. Lots of green, whereas I prefer blue tints myself. But now none of the other Linux distros installed previously will boot, always a file missing. That is with three hard drives and 14 partitions involved. Got to play nice, you know, in order to get along. Now I’ve got a lot of reinstalls to do just to get back where I thought I was.
Can’t condemn OpenSUSE outright for that, but it needs fixing. Need to be precisely clear about what partition is to be used for what, which ones to ignore, and which one or ones to reformat, before going further with the install. No one Linux distro can presume to own the PC in question. If you don’t know how to do this, look at the manual mode with the partitioner in Ubuntu. Also need to be able to designate which partition is to be treated as boot. That is covered in Ubuntu as well.
The new version of Ubuntu even lets you pick one or more 1st partitions where Grub will install itself, just in case what is considered sda1 or hda1 is not actually the first drive (this has happened on my PC due to the way the BIOS treats a mix of EIDE and SATA drives).
Not claiming that Ubuntu is in any way better than OpenSUSE, but to me, their approach to manual partitioning is more precise. Their automate modes of either just replacing the old operation system or splitting drive space into a dual boot configuration probably suits beginners more. I prefer the manual mode myself, but the manual mode has to cooperate with my needs. That is all I am asking for.