Hello, this is my first time doing a custom partition, I tried to do it with only the assistance of reading as I go, but I don’t believe I found enough information last night. What I am trying to do, is put openSUSE on 200gb out of 500gb space on my external hard drive, as well as on 50gb space out of 110gb on my internal hard drive. The remaining 60gb space on my internal drive is going to be for microsoft windows. The remaining 300gb space on my external drive will be storage space. It seems like what I want to do is achievable, but I really would like some advice.
What I want is to have my main openSUSE on the external drive (primary partition I think?), with the GRUB loader so that when the external drive is not plugged in, my little brother can use windows on my internal hard drive.
I tried this last night, and when installation had finished, I rebooted my computer and the screen was just blank black with the flashing white line as if waiting for me to type, although it would not allow me to type when I tried.
It would be great if someone could tell me the order in which to partition, including the terms primary partition, extended partition, and logical partition, as needed… I don’t want to permanently muck up this machine. (Thank you for reading :shame: )
Check your windows partition with yast–hardware–partitioner.
give me the model of your graphics card.
Can you boot with windows?? Or you can not?? I have a cd which repair your MBR. I had the same problem with a scssi usb hdd.
Well if you want to fix this I give you a solution:
Basically, it’s a normal install. However, you have to use the custom
partitioning - don’t accept any suggested layout for modification - to
ensure you only install on the USB drive and leave /dev/hda untouched.
At the confirmation stage, select change and write GRUB to the MBR of
the USB drive by re-ordering the drive list so that the USB drive is the
first and leaves the /dev/hda MBR unchanged. That allows you to use F12
or ESC (or whatever your system has) to select the boot device.
Read this if you want to install suse install suse to a usb drive http://www.pendrivelinux.com/usb-suse-installation-from-linux/
I think what you need to do is reinstall Grub onto the internal HDD or the Windows partition and make Windows the default system to boot. The when you remove the external HDD, grub still boots Windows. BTW, 60Gb seems small for a Windows gaming machine so I’d suggest 80Gb on the internal for Windows and only 30Gb for the OpenSuSe / (root) partition
sda 110 Gb
sda1 NTFS 80 Gb Wiindows
sda2 linux 30 Gb /
sdb 500 Gb
sdb1 linux 200 Gb /home
sdb2 swap 2 Gb /SWAP
sdb3 NTFS 298 Gb windows storage?
My thoughts.
Thanks so much for the help, I just have one more question, which filesystems should I make for the partitions? The last time I tried with the help you both gave me, I had it set up like so (bold) :
As well (Question 2), I am a bit confused by the mount points. The mount options I added to the below list in red.
sda 110 Gb
sda1 NTFS 80 Gb windows -no mount point-
sda2 Ext4 linux 30 Gb /
sdb 500 Gb
sdb1 Ext4 linux 200 Gb /home
sdb2 swap 2 Gb /SWAP
sdb3 NTFS 298 Gb -no mount-
Finally, I did as stamostolias said, and reordered the drive list so that sdb was before sda, and put the GRUB loader on sdb1. However when I tried to boot my computer from my external hdd, the black screen appeared and nothing happened, so I didn’t do something right… any ideas as to what may cause this? When I tried to boot from the internal harddrive however, it boots into suse properly.
Yes, I had the same problem with a scssi hdd. Because you must set grub to dual booting on scssi devices. It is difficult to boot with a usb hdd. These solution is to repair your computer and boot from a operating system. Because I imagine that you could boot no operating system and you had black screen or your screen wrote something like “grubgrubgrub…” If you want to make boot from a usb device(scssi) there is a solution. This solution is “syslinux”. Do not try on your computer. You can download it from yast–>software–>software install/unistall. Write syslinux and download it.
Always friendly!!!
Sorry for the late reply. I think Stamostolias and I are saying the same thing. It’s safer to install grub to the sda or sda1 (the internal HD) than to rely on the USB external. Grub on the internal should be able to boot the Windows or OpenSuse. I would have Windows as my default OS to boot and OpenSuse (desktop and failsafe) as optional. The internal drive is always available even when the /home on the external drive would be unavailable.
Your external drive as configured does not have the required folders/directories to boot OpenSuSe or Windows those are on your internal drive. I think you would need another /boot partition and /boot/grub/menu.lst created on sdb1 that points to the /boot partition and files on the internal drive to boot. The /boot is on the / (root) partition of your internal drive.
I think your mount points are correct, sdb3 as NTFS should show up with both Linux and Windows. You can use EXT2FSD.EXE on Windows to read/write files to your Linux partitions when you’re running Windows, but sdb3 gives you extra space immediately under Windows.
With syslinux you can boot from a scssi. Try with this and send us the results!!!
If you want to fix your partitions you can also use yast–>system–>partitioner.
Always Friendly!!!