I don’t know if this is the right community to ask but here goes.

So… I tried to install opensuse on my PC today. It already had windows and fedora. I was planning to replace fedora with opensuse.

The installation process went fine till at the end of installation opensuse gave some error about efi partition. For context my efi partition is 100 mb (not the recommended 500 mb). And I had also installed MX Linux which is still visible in the boot option even though I deleted MX Linux long time ago.

After the installation, I rebooted my pc and… there is no open suse boot option, even though installation was completed after the error. I booted into windows, and it showed me an error screen with a qr code 🙃.

It then automatically booted into fedora (which btw was deleted during opensuse installation), but it was stuck at loading screen, so I powered off my PC. When I powered my pc back on, the monitor showed no signal. The fan lights on the PC were as usual.

What just happen here and how do I resolve it?

  • pryre@lemmy.world
    9·
    4 days ago

    You definitely shouldn’t have hardware problems, so there’s one stress off your mind at least. Now just recovery.

    Assuming you didn’t do anything to drastic, you’ve probably only broken the EFI. This is not he wrost case by far. I would do the following:

    • make a Linux live USB, as suggested in the other comments.
    • boot up and inspect your disks and the current partition layout.
    • double check that your windows drive (NTFS partition) at least exists, bonus points if you can access it, don’t stress yet if you cannot.
    • given you were going to overwrite fedora, I would delete those partitions, and the opens use ones if they exist as well, and start with a blank segment of disk to work from.
    • (optional) expand your boot partition to 500MB/1GB. Small cost really, and will save you future pain if you’re exploring other distros. You may have to move the windows partition to do this, this is usually safe enough to do with a GUI partition manager (gparted), perhaps riskier on CLI. Just take it slow and be sure with the steps. Check data access after it’s done.
    • go back through the install process for opensuse, it should be able to automatically create all the needed partitions with the empty space you have left on the disk.
    • boot opensuse, rejoice.
    • make a windows boot drive, boot into that and perform a recovery. Note that this might break grub, depending how Microsoft is feeling that day. Second worst case is that you’ll have to redo your boot ordering. Worst case is that you’ll have to hope back into a live USB and regenerate grub.
    • okwhateverdude@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      4 days ago

      This is the right answer. Different distros size their initramfs differently including how much of the kernel is available at boot time. All of this takes space in the boot partition. If you have multiple OSes all sharing that boot partition, it needs to be bigger. I wouldn’t call this step optional.

    • fmshtio83@sh.itjust.worksOP
      3·
      3 days ago

      I can’t boot into live USB because there is no display output (like not even the boot option screen)

      (edit) It works when connected to GPU output

      • pryre@lemmy.world
        5·
        3 days ago

        Unfortunately, I think we’ve all had that panic (plugging a monitor into the motherboard and not the GPU). welcome to the club!

        Can you get into the BIOS/UEFI menu? Typically by pressing [DEL] or [F12] in the first few seconds of boot. From there, there’s generally a menu to either select to order (put the USB drive at the top of the list), or on fancier menus, the “Save and exit” page may even have a “Boot device [USB]” button.

    • TimeRonin@lemmy.world
      21·
      3 days ago

      What is the efi exactly? Isnt that the thing that decides the architecture? Ie ntfs, fat32, etc? Is it like linuxes equivalent to windows mbr (master boot record)?

      • pryre@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 days ago

        The EFI partition is a section of your harddrive.that contains bootable binaries(?). In UEFI mode, your motherboard scans all harddrives EFI partitions. I believe they are always FAT32, marked with a “boot” flag, and essentially contains folders for each OS bootloader.

        I’m simplifying quite a bit I suspect, but that’s the gist of it.

        Your harddrive will be in either MBR or GPT mode, selected when you or your first OS made the partition table. Any modern system should have picked GPT, and I don’t think windows uses MBR anymore either. Bit fuzzy on that one.

        The “architecture” as you describe it is a partition format, or how the data is “physically” arranged on that section of the disk; fat32, NTFS, ext4, btrfs, etc. Skipping over a heap of context, This is something that is specific to each partition, and is selected more out of convention or preference than anything else. There are a few exceptions, but in general, your boot drive will be fat32 (as above), windows generally will use NTFS for its main partition (other special partitions may use other formats), Linux may use many different formats, but by general convention it would be ext4 (this is a very sweeping statement, but I think its a good place to start).