I suspect you booted the install media in EFI mode thus it wants to install as EFI which uses GPT. You selected a really weird configuration. Also possible that it just came that way, it is the new standard. You are swimming against the stream to force old methods on new hardware. Sure you can do it but it take a bit more then rudimentary knowledge.
Sure any number of programs can set a boot flag fdisk being one
man fdisk for the manual page
Think it can be done with yast also
You can convert GPT to MBR; e.g. gdisk can do it. Then you can of course mark MBR partition as active. You will need to reinstall grub though as it won’t find its installation directory (it is looking for GPT partition now). You could also make so called hybrid-MBR which has partition for each GPT partition; but it is less common and less tested and so may have unknown pitfalls.
OpenSUSE was installed using UEFI or EFI
It was not.
Both disks are GPT. I’m not sure where I set this
It’s hard to tell not knowing step by step what you had been doing. May be disks were GPT already and installer does not change disk label normally.
Based on your advice it seems the best avenue would be to set Booting from Legacy to UEFI, and then reinstall OpenSUSE 13.2 using GRUB2-EFI because the installer expects an EFI version of GRUB as opposed to legacy.
I have never said it. I would change from GPT to MBR (at least for boot disk sdb) and reinstall grub. But there are many ways to skin a cat. I am not sure how you get this situation in the first place and it sounds like pretty bad installer bug unless you got warnings/errors that we are not aware of.
Hello Everyone,
I attempted to convert the drive to MBR and reinstall GRUB, which, unfortunately didn’t end up working. Bummer.
I ended up reinstalling OpenSUSE with the BIOS boot mode set to UEFI, and now everything works great. Thank you to all of you who helped me understand what the issue was and for answering all my questions.
I hope this thread will be of help to some other new SUSE-ers
Thanks again,
C