I just bought a new computer – DELL XPS8930 with two hard disk drives. Downloaded the ISO and burned it to a memory stick with Etcher. When I try to boot from there, it runs for about half a minute, and then it just dies.
Tried to boot from a DVD … that one can’t see my solid-state disk, just the regular SATA drive. And it throws a lot of i/o errors once it starts reading from the repositories.
Any ideas?
Try burning with imagewriter instead of etcher?
Please describe what “it runs” looks like or means, and the process by which what to boot was presented and selected.
Tried to boot from a DVD … that one can’t see my solid-state disk, just the regular SATA drive. And it throws a lot of i/o errors once it starts reading from the repositories.
From online repositories? Is this via a wireless connection? If yes, can you try a wired connection, or no internet connection?
Well, I mean I see the graphic screen that gives me options (Boot from HDD, Install, Upgrade, Rescue System). So I select “install”, and there’s about 30 seconds worth of activity (in TTY mode, not X11), and then the screen just goes dark. 10 or 15 minutes pass, and nothing happens at all. So all I can figure to do is turn the power off and reboot from a different device. How did I select it? I used the BIOS interface to turn off “Secure Boot”. When it powered on, I hit F12 to enter the Boot Options menu. I selected USB stick with UEFI enabled, and hit Enter. I’ve tried setting a priority list in the other BIOS menu (F2), but it doesn’t seem to persist … Windows keeps putting itself first after I reboot. So the only way I can figure to get it to boot from an alternate device is with F12.
Well, I didn’t think the i/o error was on the DVD, but I decided to burn another one. Anyway, my big question is why the installer can only see one of my disk drives. I have a “SSD”, and a regular SATA HDD. I used a Windows utility called Disk Manager to “shrink” the Windows OS partition, so now there is about 125 GB of unallocated space on the SSD. But the installer didn’t see it, and I wonder why not. Oh – I’m using the big ISO … 3,961,856 KB.
Anyway, I just finished burning and verifying another openSuSE iso disk, so I guess I’ll try booting from that one. I’ll be back later.
Well, I tried just about everything I could think of with the openSuSE iso disk, and nothing seemed to work. I had a copy of an Ubuntu install disk, so I tried that, and at least I got a Linux system up and running. But Ubuntu couldn’t see the Solid State Disk, either. Anyway, I have a lot of disk space. For now, Linux will just have to boot from the SATA disk. I guess I need to go study up on the peculiarities of solid state disks. I’ll try installing SuSE alongside Ubuntu sometime, I guess.
When in doubt I create a live system on a pen drive:
erlangen:~ # smartctl -a /dev/sdc
smartctl 7.0 2019-05-21 r4917 [x86_64-linux-5.2.5-1-default] (SUSE RPM)
Copyright (C) 2002-18, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: SanDisk based SSDs
Device Model: SanDisk SSD U100 64GB
Serial Number: 044fafae1
LU WWN Device Id: 5 001b44 0fa44e1fa
Firmware Version: KM.10.00
User Capacity: 64,023,257,088 bytes [64.0 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate: Solid State Device
Form Factor: 1.8 inches
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: ACS-2 T13/2015-D revision 3
SATA Version is: SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is: Tue Aug 13 10:43:28 2019 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
...
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.
erlangen:~ #
All new hardware will boot the image, such as:
The live system allows for convenient testing.
Well, I’ve made some progress. I installed Ubuntu 18.04.3 on my SCSI drive, and also KDE Neon. And I got a clean install with an older ISO file for openSUSE LEAP 15.0. It ran great when it first booted from the hard drive after the installation. But now it won’t boot from the hard disk. The Grub2 menu shows entries for SUSE Linux, and for Ubuntu and also Neon. Ubuntu and Neon both start up OK from that menu. SUSE tries to start, but hangs up after about three seconds.
I looked at the Grub2 menu entries with the “e” editor, and it looks as if Ubuntu and Neon have much simpler startup parameters than SUSE. There are actually two different GRUB2 menus available … if I choose “Ubuntu” or “Neon” in the BIOS, I get a real short menu without any mention of SUSE. If I choose “openSUSE” in the BIOS, I get a longer menu with more – and much more complicated – entries.
The Ubuntu startup entry in the shorter menu says
setparams 'Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS (18.04) (on /\dev/sda3)'
So I guess I’ll try making a temporary change that looks about the same for SUSE, which is on dev/sda7. But I wonder if there are better alternatives? Is somebody enough of an expert on Grub2 to offer some advice? Thanks! 
(Oh, yeah. I also have a small problem with both Ubuntu and Neon. They work fine as long as I’m working on the machine. But if I go away for a few minutes, and I get signed out, I can’t get the attention of the OS to sign back in again. The terminal says “No video signal” no matter what I do with the mouse, or the keyboard. All I can do is power it down and reboot. I’m sure I can figure that out eventually, but it seems like an odd problem for a well-known distro like Ubuntu to have in the basic version.)
If you would upload output from bootinfoscript to https://susepaste.org/ we should be better able to help you diagnose booting issues. The susepaste CLI utility can make such an upload very easy. The same can be done via Ubuntu or Neon boot using the Debian CLI utility pastebinit. You’ll only need to post a resulting URL here after running either utility.
Power save and screen locking can be adjusted to off or a much longer period to work around the loss of I/O until the problem source can be found and corrected.
OK. Here’s that URL: SUSE Paste. I decided to reinstall SUSE (3rd try) and took extra care with examining the partition assignments / boot loader configuration. Right now I’m running LEAP 15.0, and it just finished downloading about 600 patches (I installed from an old DVD, still usable). Now just watch … this time it will probably boot just fine. 
The updater says I must restart for the new kernel to take effect. I’ll be back in 30 minutes or so to let you know how that worked out.
Yeah, I thought of that. I’m pretty sure I can solve that one on my own. I may go join a Ubuntu forum somewhere.
OK, I still have the problem. The Grub2 menu for openSUSE is different than it used to be … it doesn’t include options for Neon or for Ubuntu any longer … just 2 SUSE items, and that’s it. When I try to use that to boot up, it says “loading initial RAMdisk” for a few seconds, then flashes one error message (something about can’t bridge to USB, or something like that … I can’t really read it because it’s only there for like a few milliseconds) and the screen goes blank. I ask my monitor what’s going on, and it says “no video signal” (this computer has both DVI and HDMI outputs, but only DVI is hooked up right now). Keyboard and mouse are dead … I just have to hold the power button until the machine shuts down.
I appreciate any help you can offer. I did notice one thing in the bootinfoscript output (line 1112):
1112. ========= Devices which don't seem to have a corresponding hard drive: =========
1113.
1114. sdb
1115.
So this is probably the SSD that Linux can’t locate. I’ll worry about that later. For now, I’d just like to get a bootable version of openSUSE installed on sda somewhere. I guess I’ll try burning a “Tumbleweed” ISO disk, too, just for fun. 
So it wasn’t all smooth sailing, but I now have a version of Tumbleweed installed on sda9 (a new partition), and it looks like it’s going to boot OK. I had to install it twice, and “upgrade” it once before I got something that would boot up twice in a row and retain system functionality. (The first install failed to boot itself from the hard disk at the end of the installation process; I did an “upgrade”, and that fixed the boot problem, but left me with a system that wouldn’t recognize my ethernet card – I couldn’t even access my router at 192.168.1.1. So I did another “install” over top of the first one, and that startup menu works with all three flavors of Linux I have installed on sda. I’ll keep my fingers crossed!)
Thanks for all the help and encouragement.