Laptop HP Pavilion 14 (what HP calls a “sleekbook”), dualbooting oS 13.1 64-bit KDE4.11 and W8.
Today I had to connect to the internet to access a site that would not work with FF on oS 13.1. The dumb site works in IE, however :(. I then got a notice that W8.1 free upgrade was available in their store. It was quite difficult to leave the notice without installing it, most annoying.
Anyway, in Yast bootloader module it says it’s using grub2-efi. /boot/efi resides in sda2 260 MB partition. That’s the windows boot manager that grub2 chainloads to, IINM. I don’t know were grub2 is installed, things are a bit (lot) different from grub…
My question is: If I allow the upgrade to W8.1, will it break the boot menu/grub2 (like, perhaps, booting directly into windows)? If so, what measures should I take to prevent or fix it?
Hi
It did for me, for a start my windows 8 partition was too small and it needs to create an additional partition from what I could see so blew up my install… now that may have been because of the partition size? Anyway, it said it couldn’t update and rolled back to 8.0 and no more openSUSE boot…
I wasn’t worried I just re-installed openSUSE and no windows… I now have a bigger drive so re-installed windows 8, let it upgrade, shrunk it down to 100GB and carried on with my openSUSE and SLED installs…
Yes probably. The problem is that 8.1 will rewrite the entire /boot/efi partition And wipe out the openSUSE stuff. Not very friendly is it :’(
I believe that that if you backup the /boot/efi/opensuse It may be possible to restore it You may also need to change the order of boot in the UEFI boot menu.
I’m itching to do that - so I can use the 32GB SSD as system dir, but not now. This is my daughter’s laptop, at college they use a bunch of windows-only apps, and due to BricsCAD a VM won’t do because of the intel HD GPU, currently only supported by redsdk on windows - the 3D tech used by BricsCAD 3D modeling. She’s studying mechanical engineering and got a student license for BricsCAD Platinum, so she needs a real (as opposed to virtual) windows machine… Hopefully in a few months/next year redsdk will expand their support on linux (only nvidia and ATI for now) and she can ditch W8.
On Thu 20 Feb 2014 03:36:01 AM CST, brunomcl wrote:
@Malcom,
I’m itching to do that - so I can use the 32GB SSD as system dir, but
not now. This is my daughter’s laptop, at college they use a bunch of
windows-only apps, and due to BricsCAD a VM won’t do because of the
intel HD GPU, currently only supported by redsdk on windows - the 3D
tech used by BricsCAD 3D modeling. She’s studying mechanical engineering
and got a student license for BricsCAD Platinum, so she needs a real (as
opposed to virtual) windows machine… Hopefully in a few months/next
year redsdk will expand their support on linux (only nvidia and ATI for
now) and she can ditch W8.
My HP 2000 has an ATI Wrestler [Radeon HD 7340] GPU my current HDD in
there is a WD Black 320GB @6Gbps, I had various setups with windows 8
on a second drive in a caddy and no dvd, ssd etc, but settled on the
above and meets my requirements.
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 13.1 (Bottle) (x86_64) GNOME 3.10.2 Kernel 3.11.10-7-desktop
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Yes, it will boot straight into Windows after the 8.1 upgrade.
I did not have any problems getting back to opensuse. But that probably depends on the UEFI implementation, and on your experience with working around UEFI problems.
In my case, the opensuse NVRAM entry was still there, but no longer the default. So I had to use F8 during boot and select opensuse (or opensuse-secureboot).
I don’t think it erased the EFI partition. I’m pretty sure everything was still there.
As for where grub is installed – booting is from “/boot/efi/EFI/opensuse” (which is a directory).
I had a similar experience as the previous poster and agree:
depends on the UEFI implementation
The one complication that I had was that the upgrade to windows 8.1 takes some space from one of the windows partitions and creates an addition small partition. The affect was to move (say) sda7 (which was were my opensuse installation was) to sda8. When I then booted opensuse it failed (until I corrected it) as it was looking for opensuse on sda7.
So am not sure making a copy of your efi/boot settings before upgrading (???) to 8.1 would help as the grub2-efi pointers would be wrong.
If I click on the side menu (doesn’t happen in all entries) I get the following errors:
**Warning**: Unknown(E:
et\sites\www.mat.uel.br\geometrica\home.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in **Unknown** on line **0**
**Warning**: (null)(): Failed opening 'E:
et\sites\www.mat.uel.br\geometrica\home.php' for inclusion (include_path='.;c:\php4\pear') in **Unknown** on line **0**
It’s a college site for geometry students, not a scam.
Thank you guys, for all answers. I might upgrade this weekend, or let it be for some time. It’ll depend on how much my daughter uses it. The problem would be if she worked connected to the internet, as W8 will then pester her to upgrade - and it IS hard to bail out of the upgrade. But I think she’ll be offline most of the time, as she browses from openSUSE - and understand that the risks are greater in windows.
Curiously, she is just like some die-hard windows users that can’t get used to another desktop, only the other way around She’s on openSUSE since she was a kid, and can’t/won’t get used to W8 “modern” interface.
Yes, you are quite right about that. Windows creates a new partition, and then renumbers the partition so that the numbering is in sequence with the location. And that affects anything that depends on partition number.
I avoided that problem with my upgrade, because I have linux on a second hard drive which Windows did not touch.
Ah, good to know, thanks dht2 and nickert. With Malcom’s script and a judicious application of my trusty Parted Magic disk, it shouldn’t be hard to fix.
I tried it, I see what you mean. I also tried it in Chrome, found out: Does the same thing in Chrome.
Didn’t try it in IE, though, so didn’t get that annoying notice to upgrade.
Silly question, maybe, but …
Why don’t you run Windows in a VM? This would kind of sandbox it to make things a bit less risky, wouldn’t it?
=====
In your reference to your daughter’s resistance to the Mighty-weary-other-System desktop, I don’t find that curious, at all.
I think that if someone becomes comfortable with running openSUSE (or any Linux) for any length of time, it is only natural to develop a strong aversion to that side of the PC world.
> Yes, you are quite right about that. Windows creates a new partition,
> and then renumbers the partition so that the numbering is in sequence
> with the location. And that affects anything that depends on partition
> number.
>
> I avoided that problem with my upgrade, because I have linux on a second
> hard drive which Windows did not touch.
>
Looks like we still face some “it depends” situations. In my particular
case, my 2TB drive was fully partitioned with 10 partitions (Win8, the 3-4
that Win 8 created plus one new data partition (the Win backup from the
update). All the Linux partitions (swap + 4 ext4 partitions for 2 versions
of oS) were packed up against a shrunken Win 8 NTFS partition so the new Win
backup was created at the end in space I intentionally left free and assumed
the next partition number in sequence - 11 in this case.
This was on a fairly recent HP Envy h8 box and yes, the boot info got
clobbered but the Linux partitions survived. I suspect that leaving a free
space at the end for Win 8.1 to gobble during the upgrade was the key to
keeping the original sequence numbers but I can’t say that with any
certainty. Your cautions about possible problems are still the best
protections.
I’m pretty sure if it was W7 she wouldn’t mind all that much. It’s the weird interface that makes it too alien for her. For me it also feels too dumbed-down.
She’s on openSUSE since she was a kid, and can’t/won’t get used to W8 “modern” interface.
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