This may seem stupid, but in every picture I have seen of the install discs there is an option to install. When I boot up my KDE Live-CD disc there is no option for this. I loaded up KDE openSUSE off the CD and there is a install icon but when I try to go through this setup it always crashes the install when I click to resize a partition.
I’m trying to install on a laptop and I want to replace the data that’s on there (that includes a couple of XP partitions.) The installer seems to want to resize my windows partitions and for some reason doesn’t offer an easy way to say “No, I don’t want that crap anymore.” When I do the expert partition I delete the FAT partitions and then try to resize the /home partition to get started on redistributing the space the installer crashes out.
The DVD is the primary installation media, and so its menu has installation (and related) selections. The primary purpose of the LiveCD is demonstration; the Desktop icon will launch an installation process which is somewhat abbreviated compared to the DVD install.
It is conceivable that the downloaded iso file or the burned CD are faulty. You should always do an md5sum check on the iso file before burning, and then once burned do the media check on the boot menu (the former verifies the download, the latter verifies the burn).
If the media is OK, then boot into the LiveCD, open a terminal window, and do this:
So I finally managed to get past all of my problems. In case anyone stumbles across this in the future and would like to know what I did, I’m posting it here.
**As far as I could figure out the DVD drive on this laptop is pretty well busted (but so is the battery…either of which might have caused the PXE errors I was getting earlier.) What I ended up doing was use Partition Magic to create an ext2 partition. I then installed the Ext2 Installable File System For Windows ( Ext2 IFS For Windows ) so that I could access the new partition. After that I copied the DVD ISO over to the new ext2 partition (which I named SUSEINST for easy recognition to make sure I could easily check to ensure the installer wasn’t going to try and delete the partition with the ISO on it.) I also renamed the ISO file to openSUSE.iso
I then mounted the DVD ISO in Alchohol (inside Windows) and ran the windows installer, which just installs a new boot sequence. After that I rebooted the computer and went into the installer. It says to make sure the disc is in the drive, which is confusing, but I just chose to go back and I then chose install (once or twice) and then it asked me to choose where my install media was so I selected Hard Drive. Next I chose the partition SUSEINST and entered /openSUSE.iso (which is what I renamed the ISO to.)
After that it was pretty easy. When I got to the partition stuff I simply made sure it wasn’t going to do anything to my install partition (SUSEINST which for me was 4.)**
I’m sorry if this is confusing. I’m pretty tired right now but I wanted to make sure I posted this before I forget. If I could have stumbled across this when I was searching for a solution to my problems it would have helped me a lot.
much easier way is to use a disk wipe ie. Darik’s Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe to wipe the disk first a lot of oem installed os’s have peaces in the bios that “locks” parts of the hdd to get around this you can wipe the MBR (master boot record) after doing this the bios wont know what part to “lock” so it wont allowing you to repart the disk
