Problems installing OpenSUSE alongside Windows

Hello,

I am trying to install OpenSUSE-12.3 alongside Windows 7 Home Premium on a Laptop.
I have created a 50GB unallocated space by shrinking volume on drive ‘C:’ and booted from OpenSUSE-12.3 installation CD.
During installation I have encountered two problems:

  1. In the ‘Linux Installation’ Screen, when Linux installation is searching for Linux partitions a YaST2 message pops saying:
    “The partition on disk /dev/sda is not readable by the partitioning tool parted, which is used to change the partition table. You can use the partitions on disk /dev/sda as they are. You can format them and assign mount points to them, but you cannot add, edit, resize or remove partitons from that disk with this tool”
  2. On the ‘Suggested Partitioning’ Screen, there is a message in red saying:
    "No automatic proposal possible. Specify mount points manually in the Partition Dialog"

Since I don’t want to damage the Windows installation, at this point I quit OpenSUSE-12.3 installation.

Does anyone know what should I do in order to install OpenSUSE-12.3 alongside windows?

Thank you.

Boaz Niv.

How is the Windows partition formatted.

Since you don’t plan to change the Windows partition from the installer You can proceed and set the format by hand

Select the advanced option and set

a swap partition 1-1.5X memory max 2 gig if you don’t plan to hibernate other wise at least equal to memory
a root partition mounted as / of about 20 gig
a home partition mounted as /home the rest

note you may not be able to mount the Windows partition depending on how it is formatted

.

.

I tend to use a custum Linux distro to partition my hard-drives, namely SystemRescue:

http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage

This is a live linux cd of only about 50mb. Load it into your drive reboot and (check your BIOS to see if dvd is a priority boot over your hard-drive) choose the gui version at login. Once loaded use gparted to partition the drive to how you want it… the above values seem good to me. then reboot and change the disc to your Suse install medium!

Gparted is handy to have in your library as it has a wealth of useful tools which you can read at your pleasure from the above link :slight_smile:

Was your disk ever used as dynamic disk (not default basic disk) in Windows?

Personally I’d boot Parted Magic and use Gparted to asses the situation and if possible create the partitions ready, so all you would have to do in the 12.3 installer is set the mount points.

It might be worth just checking, whilst you are in Parted Magic, exactly what fdisk reports