opensuse installation very slow

Hi guys,
right now I’m installing opensuse 11.2 x64 on my machine.
I have win7 installation so I’m making it dual boot.
The problem is that the installation is extremely slow. I’ve started it 20 min ago and it is still at 3% in preparing disks part of the setup.
The installation is standard (no shrinking or etc) - I’m installing it on a separate empty partition on my raid volume.

My machine is :
asus motherboard
intel i5 750
4gb ram
radeon hd 5830
2x1TB HDD connected in RAID0

Did you check the install media, i.e. ran md5sum on the downloaded iso, verified the burnt medium? It looks like the install medium is not 100% OK, and it should be to properly install.

I’ve ran both md5 and cd checks.

After 15 more minutes it finally has reached 100% (total of 35min). Then the setup continues as normal. In less than 10min Opensuse was installed successfully.

What size of partitions did you create, did you configure RAID as well ? Adding things up, all in all it took 20+15+10=45 minutes, of which the 10 is quite impressive, considered what you get.

Enjoy your openSUSE !!

My RAID partitions were previously configured by win7.
I had

  1. 200GB for windows
  2. 500 NTFS
  3. 1TB NTFS
  4. The rest (130GB) at the end of the volume were unpartitioned.

I’ve let suse setup to decide by its own how to create partitions and the result was:

  1. 102 MB /boot I guess
  2. 2GB /swap
  3. 20GB /root
  4. 116 GB /home
  5. some mbs unpart.

Just a warning. You do know that if anything at all goes wrong with a RAID 0 you have lost ALL your data? RAID 0 does increase the throughput of a system but it also makes it more fragile. Also the speed increase is really only seen on reading large files. Random read/writes not so much. IMO it is just not worth the risk for the average desktop or server. There are situations where it can be useful but you need to have a good backup plan.

Thanks for the warning. I’m well aware.
I have a complete image of my windows partition and after a few weeks I’ll make on linux too.
Also I have all my sensitive data backed up.

The difference in speed of read/write is really noticeable and not only on benchmark tests. Even on small random files the speed is at least double than on normal configuration.

But yes it is really fragile. Every time I experience a power failure, I’m literally rolling a dice :wink:

I’m writing here to not open a new topic.

Curiously after I restarted my computer there was no sign from the grub loader. It boots automatically in win7. It’s actually the first restart after the installation. I haven’t changed anything during the setup. Did I missed something?
I have a /boot/grub folder on the first ext4 partition so I think grub is installed and it is just not linked with the MBR at the 1st partition.

Is there a painless way to fix that?
I have windows7 and opensuse dvd at my disposal.