Updating 13.1 makes system unbootable

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,

I’m trying to make 13.1 run on an ancient Dell Optiplex 760 PC. Out of the box, 13.1 won’t install: Everything runs fine until the first reboot, after which the machine hangs. After a lot of trial-and-error, I figured out that the machine wouldn’t boot with the default setting of “Custom Boot Partition” (What does that mean?). Changing to “Boot from Master Boot Record” made the system bootable.

But whenever I run “zypper up”, it changes the bootmode back to “Custom Boot Partition”, leaving the system unbootable. During boot attempts I get messages like

RAID set “nvidia_cjjaciie” was activated

immediately followed by

RAID set “nvidia_cjjaciie” was not activated

and then a lot of error messages telling me that the system cannot find any harddrives.

The disk is very ordinary formatted - /dev/sda1 as a 400 MB boot partition - /dev/sda2 as a 2 GB swap - and /dev/sda3 for the root partition swallowing the rest of the disk.

How can I make 13.1 run on this system - without requiring a lot of manual rescue work after each update?

Regards,
Lars

2

See if you have RAID set on in the BIOS. Many MB have FAKE RAID built in and some have shipped with it set on for some unknown reason even if only a single drive. GO figure :open_mouth:

Dell is famous for this odd configuration.

You do need something in the MBR this would normally be either grub code or generic boot code. If generic then the boot partition is controlled by the boot flag on a partition. If this is set then grub code must be put on the boot partition to allow continuation of the boot process. If Grub is in MBR then the boot goes to the partition that has /boot on it ie i is hard coded to the MBR code.