I updated my Laptop from OS 13.2 to Leap 42.1 (by ‘update’, not ‘install’. Everything worked well but I wondered why the splash screen still showed OpenSUSE 13.1 rather than Leap 42.1.
This made me look in the Boot Loader via Yast.
I typed 'OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 in the boot loader options, but that had no effect. So I decided to check what I had on my desktop (also working with Leap 42.1 Installed but not with ‘update’)
After I changed the boot loader location to ‘Boot from Root Partition’ only and ‘set active Flag in Partition Table for Boot Partition’ my laptop no longer boots at all!! :’(>:(
I had naively assumed if anything went wrong, I could always boot from a rescue CD. But no! The boot sequence hangs at the word 'GRUB ’ and that’s it.
Changing the boot sequence in the BIOS seems to have no effect?
How was 13.1 or 13.2 (which??) installed? legacy boot or EFI boot??
I suspect you had a legacy boot using the MBR configuration and the boot flag got moved. But that is a pure guess because you did not tell us how things were set up?
Yep. Those are the parameters I fiddled with (MBR -> root, and boot flag set). I guess, I was expecting the boot loader configurator to stop me, if I did something risky, impermissible, forbidden, stupid!
…and often, it is so good, it warns you when you are about to do something stupid…but not always!
It was using MBR grub2 code. Yes, it is a dual boot with Windows (where could I get a laptop without Windows pre-installed. But then one doesn’t deinstall Windows, at best it just gets a little bit of space to keep it happy ;))
How about this?
Disk /dev/sda: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x92e61106
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 2048 704500491 704498444 336G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 1912008704 1953521663 41512960 19.8G 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sda3 * 704501760 1912008703 1207506944 575.8G f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 704503808 708708351 4204544 2G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 708710400 750653439 41943040 20G 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 750655488 1912008703 1161353216 553.8G 83 Linux
Partition table entries are not in disk order.
Sure you can wipe Windows you don’t have to have it but you do have to actively chose that.
ok there are two way this is done one is to put grub in the MBR the other is to put generic boot code in the MBR. With generic you need to have a boot flag. This way is a bit more Windows friendly in that Windows lso use generic code and at most will mess things by changing the boot flag with some updates.
Putting grub in MBR does not require a boot flag since grub knows wher you put the /boot directory and can go straight there.
So you need to do a chroot and reinstall grub
# mount /dev/sda6 /mnt
# for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done
Enter chroot mode:
# chroot /mnt
# grub2-install
# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
By the way, I assumed you meant grub2-install. And the Yast boot loader still had the changed (wrong) parameters, so I had to change them back there before it worked properly again.
But now back to my original question, the reason why I fiddled around with the boot loader in the first place:
Why does the splash screen still say “booting openSUSE 13.1” instead of Leap 42.1?
What needs to be lined up now?
Go to yast-bootloader section and change the prompt. Also be very very sure that all repositories you use are now pointing to 42.1 repos and no longer any pointing to 13.2. having mixed repos is a good way to mess things up
However, the bootloader does not offer openSUSE Leap 42.1 as an option in the Default Boot Section, only 13.1 (so it was also not updated when I upgraded to 13.2)
That is what I thought. I added Leap 42.1 by hand (as previously after upgrade from 12.x), but this now has no effect. Hence the fiddling around with other values in the Yast boot loader.