Dear people, once again I have a problem with my opensuse. This afternoon my computer suddenly stopped working and wouldn't turn on. I then carried the box to a local repair youngster, who unscrewed it and fiddled with a switch. Now I can turn the computer (an older Lenovo model) back on.
But it only boots Windows 10 automatically and I don't see a GRUB boot menu. When I go to the BIOS setup while booting (or whatever it's called today), I see under the boot options that boot from USB is switched on, Fast Boot is off and only the Windows boot loader is displayed. To be honest, I don't know if it was any different yesterday because I had never seen it before.
However, I can't boot from USB either. I had the repairman quickly copied Kali Linux onto a USB stick, and another laptop booted into some Kali setup with it. But mine ignores the stick and only boots in Windows.
Does anyone have any suggestion how I can proceed?
Presumably the grub was overwritten with the Windows boot loader. A live system helps and reinstall:
https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/GRUB_2/Reparatur/
Kali Linux is unsuitable for that. Preferably a rescue CD or something.
The fact that it doesn't boot from USB is probably due to a messed up boot order.
Maybe the USB boot entry is deactivated? Usually there's a possibility to choose at the start, often it is written briefly while you turn on the PC and it may well be that you could boot from USB. Otherwise, see if there's a USB entry that you can activate. Possibly turn off Secure Boot if not already done.
In the case of UEFI, you may be able to create a different boot entry and select the Grub efi application. On my laptop, for example, this works in the BIOS. I once had a problem and had the Windows boot manager point to grub as a workaround with "bcdedit / set {bootmgr} path" and then the path to the EFI file (e.g. \ EFI \ Linux \ grubx64.efi, for you probably different) but you would have to know what the efi application is called and in which folder it is on the ESP.
It would be important to know whether it is a classic MBR boot or a UEFI boot. Conceptually, they work very differently.
With UEFI, for example, GRUB can still be completely present and only the boot entry in the UEFI has been lost.
The necessary steps and scope are (unfortunately) based on this.
Addendum: F12 should bring you to the BBS popup for the temporary selection of the boot medium, it would be interesting whether, for example, your USB boot stick is listed here.
Put in the OpenSuse DVD, start the computer. Then go to repair mode, the Grubmanager will be rewritten again.
But how can the bootloader have been overwritten? Between the inexplicable crash (something like that happens a few times a year, probably overheating) the hard drive was never in use.
The boot order should be somewhere in the UEFI, right?
The repair man couldn't burn my opensuse image to a stick for some reason, so I took the potash that he happened to have lying around on his disk. I'll get behind it again, maybe I can try again from Windows myself.
I don't have a CD and it doesn't want to boot from USB (as described).
You can create the OpenSuse setup yourself with another computer. Goes really well with K3b and is very effective.
And somehow you also have to have OpenSuse installed.
I really don't see how that could have happened. Actually, the only possible culprit is the crash, not the repair.
Is bcdedit a Windows or Linux command? The problem is that I can't get Linux up at all. Is there an \ EFI \ directory under Windows, and if so, how can I have it displayed?
