I was an avid SuSE user from day 1 of my Linux exposure, originally I used to buy SuSE Pro but like many others moved over to openSUSE however about three years ago I switched to ArchLinux, there was nothing wrong with SuSE I just wanted a change.
With the release of openSUSE 11.4 and especially the availability of Tumbleweed I really wanted to give it a spin, I downloaded the iso at home and installed it on a VM which went very well so my next move was to do a proper physical install. I have two Maxtor 160GB IDE hard drives in work and plenty of machines lying around so took the install DVD to the office.
Having selected a P4 3Ghz, 1GB Memory machine I connected one of the 160GB hard drives and started the install procedure every thing goes fine until the installer gets to the partitioning section, cheating a bit because I now know this is where the problem starts, for some reason it wants to set up the drive in a RAID format
(Apologies for the poor quality photo.)
The moment I see this I just know it’s going to fail, but lets move forward anyway. Next up is the usual install stuff and an overview of the package selection and how the hard drive will be partitioned and formatted we say OK, we get the “Warming up” message the progress bar moves a few millimetres and;
(Again sorry for the image quality.)
The install fails, I made numerous posts on identi.ca about the failures along the way and tried the 2nd 160GB hard drive I had but what is even weirder is if I use an 80GB or smaller hard drive the partitioner formats it correctly;
/dev/sda
/dev/sda1 /boot
/dev/sda2 /
/dev/sda3 /home
/dev/sda4 /swap
Both 160 GB drives had been reformatted with Pmagic I even recreated the partition tables on them all to no avail I also tried a manual configuration of a partition scheme with the openSUSE installer but it still bombed out. There is nothing wrong with the drives as I can install FreeNAS and Fedora on them so I’m totally stumped.
I suppose I should really raise a bug but I was only ‘having a look’ to be honest, I was impressed how fast it installed (On a smaller drive and the VM) and the UI as always is crisp and clean. If I had a spare box at home I would start using it again but alas it must remain a VM only for the time being.
Oh one last moan, I don’t like the concertina wallpaper, makes it look like there is something wrong with your screen. 
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