I just installed opensuse 11.3 on to a Spare sata disk in my computer, and during the install it overwrote the MBR (which contained the headers) of my encrypted data disk (sda3) NOT HAPPY.
I even did advanced partitioning to make sure it was not going to touch this disk… and it was not in the log or anything…
Why did it modifiy the MBR of this disk when /boot was on another disk (sda2)?
so testing out your distro has cost me 32GB of data. NOT HAPPY
I am sorry to hear about the problem that you had lightyearmm. Basically, as you know, openSUSE is a free product you can download and install on your PC, at your own risk. openSUSE makes some assumptions during the installation, based on the hardware that it finds, before the installation is started. The boot section can be fully modified by you before the install process is begun. One installation default is to load the Grub Operating System Boot Selector into the MBR (Master Boot Record) of the default boot drive. It is loaded into the MBR so that grub can be used, no matter the size of the hard disk or BIOS version, to select between openSUSE and any Windows version. This behavior can be modified by your before this install takes place and it does not consider any sort of drive encryption that might be going on.
Since support for your free copy openSUSE comes basically from this forum, it is always best to ask for help before diving into its installation. In your case, you could have elected to load grub into the openSUSE partition and directed the install program to place a generic MBR onto the target drive that openSUSE was installed on. For this to work, you would have had to set your BIOS to boot from the disk on which openSUSE was installed. Because of the complication the encryption caused, no automatic installation method could have determined what the right thing was to do.
In the end, you just needed to know more about how your setup works verse how openSUSE or any Linux distribution installs on an existing and booting system, before you made the decision to install openSUSE. In general, any PC using partition encryption of any kind, should be left as is, with no other attempts to install an additional OS. Further, any such attempts should be done only after a full system backup of all important data has been performed.
>
> Hi
>
> I just installed opensuse 11.3 on to a Spare sata disk in my computer,
> and during the install it overwrote the MBR (which contained the
> headers) of my encrypted data disk (sda3) NOT HAPPY.
>
> I even did advanced partitioning to make sure it was not going to touch
> this disk… and it was not in the log or anything…
>
> Why did it modifiy the MBR of this disk when /boot was on another disk
> (sda2)?
>
> so testing out your distro has cost me 32GB of data. NOT HAPPY
>
> If this was not open source I would sue someone.
>
Why do you think that the place where /boot is has something to do with the
MBR. Probably you simply installed grub in the MBR. The second thing is, why
did you loose data, do you really install an operating system (completely
independent from the question which one) without doing a backup before?
At the end I see no question for support in your post, so probably you
should post it to the soapbox subforum.
If it is simply a complaint about opensuse you should be aware that here are
not the makers of the distribution but users which help each other.
–
openSUSE 11.2 64 bit | Intel Core2 Quad Q8300@2.50GHz | Gnome 2.28 | GeForce
9600 GT | 4GB Ram
openSUSE 11.3 64 bit | Intel Core2 Duo T9300@2.50GHz | Gnome 2.30 | Quadro
FX 3600M | 4GB Ram
> I just installed opensuse 11.3 on to a Spare sata disk in my computer,
> and during the install it overwrote the MBR (which contained the
> headers) of my encrypted data disk (sda3) NOT HAPPY.
The MBR is not in sda3.
> I even did advanced partitioning to make sure it was not going to touch
> this disk… and it was not in the log or anything…
>
> Why did it modifiy the MBR of this disk when /boot was on another disk
> (sda2)?
The place where /boot or / is, is not related to where grub initial record is written, like the MBR
of the first disk.
> so testing out your distro has cost me 32GB of data. NOT HAPPY
Why didn’t you make a backup, or switched that disk off?
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))
I’d search the web (google) for free partition recovery software. There’s a chance if you can restore a backup MBR to the primary MBR for that partition and maybe save your data. If you haven’t overwritten it.
I’d search the web (google) for free partition recovery software. There’s a chance if you can restore a backup MBR to the primary MBR for that partition that maybe you can save your data. If you haven’t overwritten it.