My laptop's firmware does not offer any "Legacy Boot" option for the hard drive. The only way to boot from the hard drive is using UEFI. This state of affairs recently forced me to learn how to prepare a UEFI-enabled openSUSE Leap 15.2 installation USB stick.
CAVEAT! It is very important to prepare the USB stick in such a way, that it will be bootable using UEFI. My laptop will happily boot an USB stick in Legacy Mode, and the openSUSE Leap 15.2 installer will then happily install the system using the "non-UEFI" GRUB2 bootloader, which effectively means it will do a "Legacy Boot" installation which will then not be able to boot, because the laptop's firmware does not offer a Legacy Boot option for booting from a hard drive.
So, to repeat once again, when the hard drive is set to UEFI boot in the firmware, the only way to create a bootable openSUSE Leap 15.2 installation on the hard drive is to:
- create an UEFI-bootable installer USB stick
- boot the installer USB stick using UEFI
How to create an UEFI-bootable installer USB stick?
First, the installer ISO must itself be capable of this. In the case of openSUSE Leap 15.2, that is not a problem.
Second, special precautions must be taken when writing the installer ISO to the USB stick. I used Rufus on Windows 10. Rufus is straightforward to use, but if guidance is needed, this page provides some: Creating an UEFI bootable Linux USB stick.
Summary
The takeaway here is: if the USB stick itself does a legacy (non-UEFI) boot, it will not be capable of installing openSUSE Leap 15.2 with GRUB2-EFI as the bootloader. It will do a Legacy Boot install, which the computer will subsequently not be able to boot (unless it supports Legacy Boot from hard drives).
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