Hi,
I’ve vista pre-installed and installing opensuse11.1 from KDE live CD. I setup disk partitioning as follows:
sda1- Recovery partition
sda2- Vista
sda3- ntfs
sda4- extended
sda5- 100MB /boot partition
sda6- 4GB swap
sda7- 5GB /tmp
sda8- 25GB /root partition
I’ve 2 issues:
Where should I install GRUB? MBR/sda4/boot?
after confirming all the details, the disk partitoning started and the plasmoid crashed. As a result the installer also exited.
Now the fdisk gives the following output:
linux@linux:~> sudo /sbin/fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x27c80bf7
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1394 11193344 27 Unknown
/dev/sda2 * 1394 9683 66581484 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 9683 11901 17817600 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 11901 30402 148603904 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 11901 11913 89668 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 11913 12434 4192933+ 83 Linux
linux@linux:~>
However the installations shows:
/dev/sda4 1kB extended 11904(start) 11904(end)
/dev/sda6 4.00GB linux native 11905(start) 12426(end)
Can someone help me fix the issue and continue the installation.
Firstly, I am not quite sure why you have not used the openSUSE defaults; in particular openSUSE normally has a separate /home partition rather than separate /boot and /tmp partitions. The normal reason for having a separate /boot partition is to be able to install GRUB on the first disk when you have Linux on another disk.
Secondly, did you actually enter all the mount points for the partitions when you set them up?
openSUSE will normally install GRUB for you as part of the install; stages 1 and 2 go in /boot and the MBR pointer in the MBR which GRUB overwrites. (You don’t install anything in sda4; it is just a container for the logical partitions.)
Unless there is a hard disk fault, the easiest fix is simply to tell openSUSE to repartition the extended partition using the default openSUSE settings; this will overwrite whatever errors have been created the first time around.
As John_hudson says, decide on what disk space you want to allocate to opensuse and vista, and install. Let suse decide where to install grub and if there are problems, look at Fixing vista multiboot with openSUSE - openSUSE Forums for how to fix them.
I didn’t use the default because it suggested me to delete all my drives including C: (sda2) drive on which Vista is installed.
I created a separate boot partition because that’s what YaST team lead suggested in the post (YaST/Bootloader MBR - openSUSE). So basically the plan was to put Grub Stage1 in MBR and stage2 in /boot so that on power-on GRUB will activate /boot and I can run Opensuse. Moreover it might help me in multi-boot scenarios as I’ll be installing another Linux distro later this year. But if ypu guys suggest I can install it in MBR too.
Separate /tmp was also created due to multi-boot scenarios so that tmp of various distros don’t take unnecessary disk space. They all can share the same tmp partition.
Yes, I did mention all the mount points.
That’s right, it was installing GRUB as part of the install only. But in the summary page I saw that it said it is going to install GRUB in sda4 which is my extended partition.
There’s no hard disk fault because even now I can boot Vista. The problem with default setting is it’s allocating the remaining 150GB to root partition whereas I want only 30GB as root partition. Rest I want to leave unallocated and use it later for the another linux.
It sounds to me as if the installer has become confused because it expects either to do all the partitioning itself or to be pointed to a free space on which to install everything; providing it will ready made partitions has confused it.
I would suggest using Vista to get rid of all the extra partitions and leave one empty space on the hard disk. Then install openSUSE and it should identify the single empty space; if you don’t want the default install, then use expert partitioning. But I suspect the reason it wanted a large / partition is that you did not specify a /home partition. So it would be assuming that /home would have to be inside it.
On a 25Gb default installation, you would normally get about 9Gb for /, swap and the rest as /home.
(Incidentally, the root partition / is different from the folder /root).
I finally got OS11.1 installed.
I deleted the logical partitions and the extended partitions. Then I accept the default values except the home partition. Now its up and running.
Thanks everyone
