I use a W10/TW dual boot setup.
Everything was fine so far. I found an external USB HDD and formatted it to ext4 to use it as Steam external drive.
I installed Steam via zypper as the official Steam site has only a deb package version. I connected the USB drive.
Launched Steam, logged to my account. Tried to install a game, unfortunately Steam could not recognize the external HDD, only the home folder.
Tried the option “repair library”, nothing. Tried to give permissions to the drive via dolphin as root, nothing.
Then decided to uninstall Steam and try the Flatpak version. Before installing the Flatpak version, I deleted the .steam folder in my home folder. Disconnected the drive.
Tried to connect to the flatpak web page, connection error. Tried to launch an application, another error. Tried command line, nothing. Tried logging out, nothing.
Decided to hard reset the PC. Then to my surprise, no Grub boot loader anymore and Windows 10 booted instead!
Could deleting the .steam folder have deleted the whole system? Because the worrying thing was that applications would not run.
Windows did not do any updates as the GRUB loader appeared fine and I logged to TW. Have no idea what could go wrong as I did nothing like deleting system folders. Could Steam have messed the system to such an extent? Perhaps a disk error?
Fortunately I have a separate laptop with Mint. I was using TW more as an experiment rather than replacing Windows 10 so no big loss.
But it was quite surprising out of a sudden not be able to boot anymore after just deleting Steam.
As you fiddled around with your system, adding and removing drives, it is quite possible that you simply need to check the UEFI boot order in your Bios and point it to the Tumbleweed OS/partition/drive.
As you don’t provide any error output or precise description what went wrong, it is hard to help. All what we know is you did “something” and all broke.
The only fact is, removing “only” the .steam directory in /home cannot cause such vague issues.
If you think that you have harddrive issues, perform harddrive/SSD tests and/or read out the SMART data.
Also checking the journal might give hints why applications won’t start anymore (if you don’t have any output in the terminal).
It was not possible for error log either as nothing would work.
I hope it is a hardware issue, preferably corrupted system files.
But such things are a warning sign that Opensuse is not for me, having to spend the whole day troubleshooting after a simple task.
Because I had installed and removed Steam few weeks ago with no issues.
I would not mind about the grub error but the main issue is that reset caused some movie folders on the portable drives to be deleted. Usually in such cases a chkdsk /f on Windows or on Linux fixes the errors but this time they were completely erased just after a hard reset. Now I am restoring the deleted folders
This is more than I can risk
Not clear what you really did. An ACPI shutdown (e.g. pushing the on/off key for 10 s) performs an orderly shutdown, including clearing disk queues and then switching off power with the system in an idle state.
At the other extreme, simply pulling the plug removes power with disks possibly still doing some data transfer or not giving enough time to orderly shutdown filesystems; filesystem corruption (e.g. folders “disappearing”) is the usual outcome and if the damage is severe enough chkdsk cannot help.
I pressed the on/off button and drives were not transferring anything either. Just on idle. Only one usb hdd drive out of 3 was affected where 2 large directories were deleted. A game and a movie folder. Fortunately I found it immediately, as over 1 tb of space was missing. at least files seem not damaged so far as the deletion was rather superficial instead of mass deleting via shift-del.
A chance to keep just the important stuff as I had movies and games I never planned to watch or play anyway