I seem to have a choice - let SUSE trample all over my Windows system (no thanks) or let the installer **** up and fail.
Basically, the problem seems to be that the installer can’t tell the difference between the root disk, and the boot disk. The install wizard wants to trample all over my nvme C: drive. I want to put SUSE on my sda linux disk. But if I use the guided install and tell it to put / on sda, it’s also putting EFI (and I presume grub) on sda too, which then gets totally ignored by the laptop, so I have an - I guess - functioning SUSE install but absolutely no way to boot it!
I neither know, nor care, how SUSE installs itself - and don’t understand btrfs and all that stuff - so the expert partitioner is both beyond me and I don’t particularly want to learn it.
So how do I get a functioning dual boot system that puts SUSE / in the emptyspace that I have prepared for it?
Hi and welcome to the Forum
Unfortunately you need to use the expert partitioner, you can share the efi files on the windows /dev/sda1 (mount as /boot/efi) they happily co-exist, just tell it not to format, grub will install under /boot on your if you booting in UEFI mode, nothing installed on the windows side or in hidden locations.
So you would have something like;
/dev/nvme0p1 /boot/efi no format type ef00
/dev/sda1 / ~40-60GB type 8300 btrfs
/dev/sda2 swap 1.5 to 2x installed ram for suspend type 8200
/dev/sda3 /home space as required type 8300 format to xfs
I’ll agree with Malcolm here about using the expert partitioner.
Based on the problem you are having, it is likely that the installer consider your current EFI partition too small. So it complains if the EFI partition is smaller than 256K. However, smaller partitions actually work fine. Normally, openSUSE need only 3-4M of space on that partition. But if you use that, the installer will complain. So you will have to tell it to continue in spite of the problem that it is reporting.
