I noticed OEM Win8.1 has a couple of extra, new partitions. The first partition on my HD calls itself a recovery partition (400MB), the second one is a FAT EFI partition (260MB), then the windows partition (650GB), then the real recovery partiton (24GB, which I copied and removed, but it left behind a 450MB partition I can’t seem to get rid of).
I made some room after the win partition by shrinking it (in the windows partitioner) and tried a normal 13.1 install, but the YaST partitioner complains my setup (swap, /, and /home; all EXT4) won’t work because - something about the FAT EFI partition. I’ve never seen this before, even on Win7. Also, I guess extended partitions are gone? (used to be a 4 partition limit unless you put the extra s in an extended partition)
GPT formatted drives no longer support extended partitions the do allow 128 regular partitions. So no real need. You do need the EFI partition if you plan to boot in EFI mode which you should do unless you like puzzles. To install openSUSE
make space
be sure to boot the install media in EFI mode
be certain the installer select the efi boot partition to be mounted as /boot/efi and that it is set to fat format and NOT formatted
be sure that grub2-efi is selected as boot controler
be sure that the box for secure boot is checked
double check your partition scheme and if ok proceed if not then back to partitioning
Some EFI BIOS seem to only like Windows if by chance you get one please return here there is a work around
Hi, and thank you - I dimly recall GPT was coming - I guess it did! I was pondering this EFI thing - when I booted on the thumb drive holding the install DVD image, it offers UEFI, which is what I was using. The trick I was missing, I guess, was telling it to mount that windows FAT partition as /boot/efi during the partitioning phase. I will give this a shot and, again, thank you.
As a side note, I noticed that Kubuntu has a nice little (KDE?) utility that lets you choose which OS to boot preferentially - does Opensuse have that one? I noticed the YaST bootloader (for GRUB2) doesn’t seem to allow you to choose the boot order.
If booted in EFI mode the installer should suggest that mount point but just be sure that it does the one thing you do have to do is set secure boot check box. Note it does not hurt anything if secure boot is off in the BIOS but if you want the dubious protection offered by secure boot it has to be manually checked.
In some EFI BIOS the boot is selected by pressing F10 at the boot screen. If you don’t boot into EFI the installer will want to install like a MBR configuration. Some EFI BIOS allow this to some degree some do not. EFI BIOS don’t seem to be very uniform
On Sat 12 Jul 2014 07:16:01 PM CDT, PattiMichelle wrote:
I noticed OEM Win8.1 has a couple of extra, new partitions. The first
partition on my HD calls itself a recovery partition (400MB), the second
one is a FAT EFI partition (260MB), then the windows partition (650GB),
then the real recovery partiton (24GB, which I copied and removed, but
it left behind a 450MB partition I can’t seem to get rid of).
I made some room after the win partition by shrinking it (in the windows
partitioner) and tried a normal 13.1 install, but the YaST partitioner
complains my setup (swap, /, and /home; all EXT4) won’t work because -
something about the FAT EFI partition. I’ve never seen this before,
even on Win7. Also, I guess extended partitions are gone? (used to be
a 4 partition limit unless you put the extra s in an extended partition)
Hi
Here is my Windows 8.1/openSUSE 13.1 setup on a HP 2000 after I deleted
things like the HP OEM bit at the start of the disk.
gdisk -l /dev/sda
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.7
Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/sda: 625142448 sectors, 298.1 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 2035B940-8321-4324-9D96-DE0FC975BBDC
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 625142414
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2014 sectors (1007.0 KiB)
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 534527 260.0 MiB EF00 EFI System
2 534528 796671 128.0 MiB 0C01 Microsoft reserved
3 796672 189048831 89.8 GiB 0700 Basic data partition
4 189048832 272934911 40.0 GiB 8300 Linux filesystem
5 272934912 608479231 160.0 GiB 8300 Linux filesystem
6 608479232 625142414 7.9 GiB 8200 Linux swap
lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 298.1G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 260M 0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2 8:2 0 128M 0 part
├─sda3 8:3 0 89.8G 0 part
├─sda4 8:4 0 40G 0 part /
├─sda5 8:5 0 160G 0 part /data
└─sda6 8:6 0 8G 0 part [SWAP]
I booted to the openSUSE 13.1 rescue cd and used gparted to remove all
the cruft and resize the windows partition after I updated it to 8.1.
I have a set of the HP restore dvd’s hence I also don’t need the
recovery partitions…
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 13.1 (Bottle) (x86_64) GNOME 3.10.1 Kernel 3.11.10-17-desktop
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And speaking of secure boot - I just finished a class in crypto - all great stuff, but the folks talking about the demise of TrueCrypt are all saying that the real problem is not insecure crypto, but the many methods of going around cryptographic schemes. I have to admit, it’s very complicated, and of course, our own government has lost control…
