Having trouble installing openSuSE 10.3; install hangs.
 

Whenever I try to install SuSE 10.3, when it gets to the point where it has to auto-reboot after installing the boot program... It comes back up, but doesn't go back to finish the installation. What's the deal? If I go to "boot from hard drive" from the selection screen, it just comes up to a login prompt, but if I go to "installation" again, it starts the process all over again!

So, what happens after you login?

Also, you are more likely to get specific help if you include a complete description of your hardware: CPU. Memory, HD(s) (type IDE/SATA/?, manufacturer, capacity), video card(s), and monitor.

Note: I can't offer any specific SuSE advice since I don't use SuSE. I just came here when I noticed you'd double-posted.

From your reply to your other post, you might also explain why your XP system died, since that problem -- whatever it was -- might relate to the SuSE installation problem.

I have an ASUS A7N8X motherboard, 2x512 Corsair dual channel RAM, USB Keyboard & Mouse, 160 GB Western Digital Hard Drive (IDE), nVidia GeForce FX 5500 256 MB graphics card, AMD Athlon XP 3000+ Barton Core Processor, monitor is a 17" flat screen CRT monitor from HP.

I can't login, because it never takes me to the screen to set up a root password or any of that stuff. It just skips the second half of the installation!

As far as the XP dying... I don't know. It was just giving me problems with service pack 2 all the time. Problems I never had with just plain old XP. Finally it got to the point where too much stuff was crashing and I couldn't even run XP anymore; so I formatted and tried to install Ubuntu.

Well, it wouldn't go, so I tried SuSE 10.3 and here I am.

Ah. As I said, I can't offer specific SuSE advice, but I suspect that the problem is the nVidia video card. Drivers for that card are propitiatory, and may not be included in an OpenSuSE distribution. In the first part of your installation, are you given a choice of video drivers? If so, can you tell the installer that your using a "generic" VGA device. (nVidia will honor VGA commands.) That may get you to the second half of the installation with a semi-working screen.

If that works you can install the correct drivers later. (Until then you may be stuck with a 640x480 or 800x600 screen size.) You should be able to find driver installation help in here or at the nVidia web site.

I think the problem might be that the bios assigns the drives one way while the kernel assigns them another way.

In the initial login screen, press escape and leave the gui mode.

The grub shell has autocompletion which allows you to search for the kernel and initrd files by pressing tab.

Start by entering "kernel (hd" and press the TAB key. You will be presented with choices you can use.
This line should end up looking like this:
kernel (hd0,3)/boot/vmlinuz

The particular drive and partitition will look differently in your case. You could add a space separated list of options at the end of the line such as "nolapic vga=791".
Next do the same for the initrd file
initrd (hd0,3)/boot/initrd

Next enter the command "boot" and press enter. Hopefully it will boot up.

If it does boot up, look at the /boot/grub/device.map file. Here you can map what a /dev/sd* device corresponds to to grub.
It is a text file and you can change the mapping so that grub install will install to the correct installation.

Um, jschiwal, he's trying to finish the SuSE install, and he's just at the "Reboot to complete" stage. Now, that may go through GRUB, but, from his description, it seemed to me that he was seeing the Login: prompt that's displayed (usually quite briefly) before the X server starts. That's why I made suggestions about the video driver, since driver problems sometimes prevent X from starting, and your left staring at a Login:, but not able to input anything.

I thought he might be bailing out at the grub shell. If he does end up at a login screen, he could try logging in as root. At that point the root account may have a null password.

However, at that point, the generic nvidia driver (nv) may not be used yet. One of the virtual screens displays a log of what is going on, and may reveal what the problem is.

Drive confusion, it seems
 

I'm having very similar problems, and the bootup process seems to be confused about which drive is which. During the initial installation (an update from 10.2) I get a message box saying

And also (I don't remember exactly where) I get:

I have a SCSI card in my system but the primary drive (the one containing the Linux partitions) is an IDE device. I suspect that something in the installation procedure doesn't understand this and thinks that my drives are SCSI.

If I push the process through and reboot, I get:

I repeated the installation, with the same results. If I choose the "Repair system" option on bootup from the CD, after some churning I get the enlightening message "An error has occurred" on a red screen.

I'm able to start up the rescue system, however, and gain some access to my files. In particular, using chroot, I can edit /boot/grub/menu.lst (the chroot enables me to call an editor -- I despise vi). So if I knew what was wrong with menu.lst and System.map, I would be able to fix the problem.

Yast can't see hard drives!
 

Perhaps my troubles are related to something else I just discovered. Using the rescue system and chroot, I got into Yast2. Under System/Hardware Information, neither Block Devices nor Storage Media list any hard drives at all! Furthermore, under System / Partitioner, no devices (and hence no partitions) are shown, and under System / Boot Loader, I get an error message "Because of the partitioning, the boot loader cannot be installed properly."

So I suspect there's a nasty bug somewhere or other in SuSE 10.3 that prevents IDE drives from being recognized at all under certain circumstances if a SCSI card is present.

I suppose I could get on the air by opening up the box and temporarily disconnecting the SCSI card, which I'm using only to support an MO drive. And these days perhaps the MO drive is obsolete anyway; I might just be better off to use a collection of memory sticks, which might even be cheaper and certainly would be faster.

Trouble source: "auto" in /etc/fstab for root partition
 

I discovered the main reason I was having such trouble getting a newly upgraded OpenSuSE 10.3 system to boot: the entry for the root file system in /etc/fstab had auto rather than ext3 as the file system type. Although auto works in most situations, it causes problems with mkinitrd, which doesn't understand it.