Posting a question about LEAP installation that failed I fat fingered and
posted to another group. Basically, booting the DVD/USB image on a UEFI HP
machine did nothing beyond a blank screen and frozen box. nrickert posted
the folowing reply:
> My advice:
> - Disable secure boot
> - Install.
> - During install, check the boot settings. Make sure that “Enable
> secure boot support” is checked.
> - Copy the “shim.efi” from 13.2 to “/boot/efi/EFI/opensuse”. You can
> do that after the reboot if you wish.
> - Enable secure boot again.
After jumping in when I first got this machine and discovering the quagmire
created by mixed UEFI/MBR installations I was treading softly but this
sounded reasonable, so I tried it. Disabling secure boot, I got to the
partition setup step of the install, selected the partitions I wanted to use
- including the boot/efi used by secure boot. Proceeding to the next step I
got a warning dialog about not having a “bios-grub partition present”. The
system wanted an unformatted partition of this type. I pressed on, figuring
that since there was no empty space for such a partition to be created I was
reasonably safe. Turns out that was a valid assumption but the installation
threw errors when it tried to install grub - obviously.
Net result, the only errors logged during the install was that failure to
install grub2. Using the 13.2 live DVD, I booted, did the chroot to get
into 13.2 to revive the boot using its grub install and examined the hard
drive, figuring that GPT never created the system partition that MBR drives
used. To my surprise, gparted revealed a 1Gb hidden partition at the head
of the disc. Following is the listing of the drive layout.
/CODE
main12:~ # parted -l
Model: ATA ST2000DM001-9YN1 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 2000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name
Flags
1 1049kB 1074MB 1073MB ntfs Basic data partition
boot, hidden, legacy_boot
2 1074MB 1451MB 377MB fat32 EFI system partition
boot
3 1451MB 1585MB 134MB Microsoft reserved partition
msftres
4 1585MB 77.0GB 75.4GB ntfs Basic data partition
5 77.0GB 77.5GB 472MB ntfs
hidden, diag
6 77.5GB 77.9GB 367MB ntfs
hidden, diag
7 77.9GB 99.3GB 21.5GB ext4 primary
8 99.3GB 339GB 239GB ext4 primary
9 339GB 351GB 12.6GB linux-swap(v1) primary
10 351GB 383GB 32.2GB ext4 primary
11 383GB 1170GB 786GB ext4 primary
12 1170GB 1202GB 32.2GB ext4 primary
13 1202GB 1988GB 786GB ext4 primary
14 1988GB 2000GB 12.0GB ntfs Basic data partition
hidden
/CODE
Out of curiosity, I looked to see what fdisk thought was there. The result
was similar other than the first 2 partitions on the disk. I realize that
fdisk is not the best tool when dealing with GPT discs, but I was curious
about that ntfs file system that parted thought was used by partition 1.
fdisk returned:
/CODE
Start End Size Type Name
1 2048 2097151 1023M EFI System Basic data partition
2 2097152 2834431 360M EFI System EFI system partition
/CODE
Net result of a long afternoon and evening - avoiding shoveling snow with 45
to 60 kt winds outside - wasn’t really a bust but more questions. I’m about
ready to kiss off leap 42.1 and wait for a fixed release. The legacy box
has 42.1 installed and it does not impress me enough to spend a lot more
time getting it on the main machine.
Since there is no live build for 42.1 yet, how close does the kernel version
have to be to that used by leap in order to boot to the DVD/USB live version
then chroot to the legacy installed version on the hard rive in order to
install the needed grub code to boot it?
What is that first partition used for? I know what it does with legacy MBR
type discs but what’s there with GPT drives?
If I have an empty hard drive, how do I set it up for GPT? A scratch GPT
drive would sure be useful for tinkering!
–
Will Honea