I was chugging along installing some gentoo on a new PC when I found that the darn thing wouldn't boot.<br>I checked my kernel opts and everything was hunk-dory, BIOS was fine, everything looked great.<br><br>So I attached a PATA drive, copied my boot junk to it. Configured and re-ran lilo to accommodate, and it booted fine...
<br>I was gonna just leave it that way, but pride got the best of me. I ain't gonna be stumped by no silicon.<br><br>What prevented me then?<br><br>The Intel BIOS won't boot from a partition that is not marked as active.
<br>I blame the BIOS, because I have a dozen more gentoo boxes that boot just fine without me having to mark one partition as active.<br>I thought the idea of a active partition was related to Windows. No?<br><br><br>FWIW, I did not try GRUB. Grub is garbage.
<br><br>The BIOS version is PE94510M.86A.0050.2007.0710.1559. So if anybody gets a new Intel Desktop MB, keep it in mind that you'll have to mark<br>your boot partition as active <br><br>$ fdisk -> a /dev/device_name -> w
<br><br>I installed the MBR onto /dev/sda1, because fdisk makes you select a partition to make active. Purist would argue that the MBR should only be installed onto /dev/sda, but I think that has to do with sector size and cylinder number issue that I feel are no longer pertinent today.
<br><br><br><br><br><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>In vino veritas.<br> [In wine there is truth.]<br> -- Pliny