Hi,
I have a Samsung New Series 9 (NP900X4D) Ultrabook since end of 2012 and I installed first opensuse 12.1, 12.3 and in the end 13.1 (each 64Bit) in parallel with Windows 7 Pro using grub. Now it seems that grub2-efi does not support my hardware anymore. See the details below.
Last weekend my opensuse 13.1 suddenly stopped booting.
I did not attempt to fix this but took this as a chance to finally install the new hardware I already bought a while before (500GB SSD + 16GB RAM).
So I first installed Windows 10 to give it a try. This was no issue at all - all was working well even without additional driver installs (surprise, never had this before!). But I’m not going to use this too much, my main OS since almost 15 years is Suse (first contact with Suse 5, seriously working with it since Suse 7.3 - but I always was just a user, not an expert).
Then I downloaded the opensuse 42.1 leap iso and put this on a USB key (using YUMI) to install. BIOS settings: UEFI + CSM, secure boot disabled.
During partitioning there was no mount point /boot/efi available in the drop-down list. I therefore added this manually for /dev/sda3.
Below the fdisk -l output, i edited the “Type” section with addition partition type and mount points (funnily, fstab is was recognizing the EXT4 partitions as “Microsoft basic data” - is this normal?). /dev/sda9 I added later after I read somewhere that I need a small efi-grub partition I never used on my previous installations. It’s a GPT partition table.
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 34 262177 262144 128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda2 264192 1163831 899640 439,3M Windows recovery environment (ntfs)
/dev/sda3 1185792 1390591 204800 100M EFI System /boot/efi
/dev/sda4 1390592 211105791 209715200 100G Windows 10 (ntfs)
/dev/sda5 211105792 244670463 33564672 16G swap
/dev/sda6 244670464 349526015 104855552 50G / (EXT4)
/dev/sda7 349526016 559239167 209713152 100G /home (EXT4)
/dev/sda8 559239168 976773119 417533952 199,1G /data (ntfs)
/dev/sda9 1165312 1185791 20480 10M BIOS boot (efi-grub)
After partition setup and software selection, I manually changed the Bootloader to “grub2-efi” but received the error message “unsupported combination of hardware platform x86 64 and bootloader grub2 efi”. This was a surprise. I did then change back to normal grub and the installation ran normally. I can boot opensuse now but only after inserting the USB key with the install media on it. There is no joint menu for Windows 10 and opensuse selection. That’s not what I want.
Since grub2-efi was working on my Laptop with several versions of opensuse without any issue before, do you have an idea what could have caused this incompatibility now? I assume that using a new SSD and new RAM should not have big influence on the UEFI BIOS (although 16GB is officially not supported by Samsung, but works).
Is there any way to get grub2-efi installed and configured to load the Windows bootloader or opensuse? Without reinstalling again (I did this already 4x during last weekend).
I always relied on the automated configuration of grub during install. I’m a complete newbie if that needs to be configured manually and would need some advises from experts.
Thanks a lot for your support!
with best regards
Marco