I burned the openSuse 14.1 iso to a USB stick using unetbootin, and it just boots to a grub prompt.

I also tried burning it with LinuxLive USB (a Windows program). This time it booted, went through the welcome screen to the menu. I selected install, and it continued on, put up some wallpaper, then went to a text screen with the error message 'Failed to find MBR identifier!, rebooting in 120 seconds'.

Any insights as to what I might try to get it installed? I'd like to see what's up in Suse-land these days...

TIA

Apparently you have some version of windows installed. Is that on the same computer? and if so, which windows. windows 8 adds some layers of complexity with EFI/GPT/Secure boot among others.

Yes, I dual (or sometimes triple) boot with Windows, as I have been for many years. On this machine, I have Kubuntu and Slackware currently sharing the system with Windows 7. No EFI stuff or anything like that.

I've never had a problem before with Windows 'owning' the MBR during a Linux install, but seeing that error msg, and thinking that it might be an issue with openSuse for some reason, I put grub on the MBR - same problem.

And why won't a unetbootin-created USB stick boot at all? Suse is doing something different from other distros, it seems...

Any ideas as to what I might try next?

Did you do an md5checksum on the iso before using unetbootin?
Are you able to test the flash drive on another computer to see if it boots?

Couldn't find an md5 checksum for the Live CD version of the iso to check against. I did test the drive on another computer that has Windows XP installed. Syslinux boots until it gives the following error:

Maybe I'll try the big DVD download if I can find a blank disc kicking around here. It's too big for my USB stick...

The opensuse link below shows the latest version as 13.1. Is that a typo in your original post (14.1). Post a link to the download site.

http://www.opensuse.org/en/

Ack! Yes, that was a typo in my original post! It's 13.1! I downloaded it from

I clicked the 'Live KDE' button, selected 'Bittorrent' and '32-bit', and clicked 'Download KDE'. The download went through without incident.

Incidentally, I was able to check the md5sum, and it checked out...

The unetbootin site shows Opensuse as a distribution supported but only 10.2 - 11.1. I don't use Opensuse so haven't tested it and don't know if the latest release would work. You might try running unetbootin again after formatting the flash drive, watch for any unusual output. You could also use the dd command to put it on the flash drive, make sure you get the right drive!

I've tried all sorts of permutation of reformatting, re-burning, using dd*, etc. No joy.

As I mentioned, I tried LinuxLive USB creator under Windows, which almost always works. It did not yet have 13.1 in its database, and so burned it using the recipe for 12.1. That almost worked - at least I got the openSuse menu instead of aborting to a boot: prompt. I wonder what changed...

Somewhere around here I have some blank DVD's, so I'll try burning the iso to DVD. If that doesn't work, I'll download the big DVD iso and try that. If that doesn't work, I'll give up :-) All I wanted was to just check out the State of the Suse...

(* A few years ago, I made the mistake of using dd to the wrong device - you see, I assumed I knew the right device, but the /dev assignments somehow got reordered. It was pretty ugly...

NEVER AGAIN will I make that mistake! I never ever run dd without a) unmounting my external HD first, and b) running blkid to be absolutely sure I've got the correct device.)

I used Suse Linux as my first Linux OS for years but haven't used Opensuse recently. I don't use CD/DVD/flash drives for testing or installing but boot them from the hard drive. I've never tried it with Opensuse, but the site below explains it. Generally, you download the iso and put it in the / of the filesystem and put an entry in grub.cfg, then save the file and reboot and select it from the boot menu. Users are advised not to edit grub.cfg and the reason is explained in the file. When I'm doing it just to do an install, it seems too cumbersome and a waste of time to do it the standard way. Anyhow, the link below at the opensuse forums explains it for 13.1 where to put the entry. If you are familiar with Grub2, it should be pretty easy. Put the iso in the Kubuntu partition either in / or in the directory indicated at the site below. I've had problems booting some systems if the iso file is not in /, but read the post and give it a try:

http://forums.opensuse.org/showthrea...ve-using-Grub2

I will give that a try some time. Right now I'm busy configuring my new openSuse 13.1 system. I finally downloaded the full DVD, burned it to an actual DVD, and installed without incident. Seems like a nice implementation of KDE so far...

Update:

I tried the boot-iso-from-the-harddrive method. With the Live CD, I got the same error message. With the full DVD, it worked fine. Maybe something about that Live image requires burning to an actual disc. I am not going to use my last blank DVD to find out...

There is a bug reported on the Novell bugzilla concerning booting 13.1 from a memory stick. The problem is with grub2, I believe. I had a bad experience with it myself. I installed 13.1 on a new Crucial SSD (/dev/sdc): all went well until the reboot, when Grub2 announced "no such device". I installed a cut down system on an older HDD (/dev/sdb) and used the Grub2 menu from that to boot the system on /dev/sdc, successfully.

All went well until one day a cold boot failed: loud roaring of disks and fans, no BIOS screen, no boot, just disc activity. After several attempts, it booted. This went on for some time. Warm boot worked, so I could reboot into Windows and shut down safely from there (usually). Finally I realized what had happened. Kernel and kernel firmware had been updated on /dev/sdc, not on /dev/sdb. Updating that last removed the problem. Grub2 was booting from /dev/sdc, shutting down from /dev/sdb, thus leaving firmware in a compromised condition.

I said removed the problem: not quite. One day I hibernated the system to disk: with the following cold boot, it returned.

try burned it into disk with UltraISO