unable to boot UEFI leap 15.3 after reinstallation of leap 15.3

English Install/Boot/Login
21

I hesitate to join back in here but I seem to have fallen back into the same hole and can no longer boot.

The short story is that I had used a USB to enable booting because my BIOS cannot boot from NVMe.
I then made space on my hard drive for the boot and efi partitions, copied over the /boot/efi and /boot from USB and was able to boot without difficulty.
Several re-boots later and happy as Larry I removed the USB stick believing that all was well. Sadly not so and I am stuck.
Since I cannot boot I have booted from Live Leap 15.3 DVD but no joy yet. Will follow this thread details above.

22

OK, my system wants to boot from “opensuse” as the preferred boot option.
If I select grub starts and crashes immediately with the message:-

unaligned pointer 0x6133426a

Looks to me in my ignorance like a missing flag but booting must have started to get grub running.

Whatever the case, can I fix it from the live distro?

23

Now I have the installation sorted it was easier to do a new install with USB stick removed first.
Hope the other poster gets his system sorted.

24

@Budgie @Svyatko @nrickert
I did get my system sorted out, I found that the installation media for Leap 15.3 installs the boot (EFI) partition as FAT32 by default, their must be something (maybe a flag?) during the partition creation of this FAT32 that my bios cant recognize, I’m sure of this because of two reasons:

  1. I had no problem booting into 15.3 if I changed the FAT size from 32 to 16 during the installation process. Never tried to convert (re partition) my FAT16 to FAT32 once I was in the system. Used the system for about a week which included reboots/shutdowns and never had any issues
  2. I had no problem booting the Oct4 snapshot of tumbleweed with the default FAT32 boot partition

As a side note Leap 15.2 default boot (EFI) partition was FAT16 so it explains why I never had any issues installing any previous versions of Leap.

@Budgie if you can try to install 15.3 with a FAT16 boot (EFI) partition and maybe you wont need the USB at all

25

Hi jayrbm,
Many thanks for the info. Interesting that the default has changed. WRT my problem, I had no problem with the USB and I had started with an USB stick for /boot and /boot/efi without problem with the rest on NVMe but only because I couldn’t get the boot components to work on my RAID array… I later found that the issue had been an initial installation on a virgin build of RAID. However if there were other partitions already on the RAID the installer didn’t look past the RAID array and I could put the boot components on the RAID with the rest, as before on NVMe. It seems the installer had been looking at individual drives of the array when I started.
Glad you sorted out your problem and thanks for the info.
Regards,

Budge.

26

ESP format defaults was changed from FAT16 to FAT32 (+ volume correction) for better compatibility with MS Windows: 1177358 – EFI system partition: VFAT or FAT16 or FAT12 or FAT32?
Possibly problem can be solved by choosing larger ESP - 512 MiB or more.
BIOS update may help with using FAT32.
But if BIOS wants strictly FAT16 then it is impossible to install Windows in EFI mode on that machine.