[GRLUG] Active Partitions

[Justin Denick]

I was chugging along installing some gentoo on a new PC when I found that
the darn thing wouldn't boot.
I checked my kernel opts and everything was hunk-dory, BIOS was fine,
everything looked great.

So I attached a PATA drive, copied my boot junk to it. Configured and re-ran
lilo to accommodate, and it booted fine...
I was gonna just leave it that way, but pride got the best of me. I ain't
gonna be stumped by no silicon.

What prevented me then?

The Intel BIOS won't boot from a partition that is not marked as active.
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.
I thought the idea of a active partition was related to Windows. No?


FWIW, I did not try GRUB. Grub is garbage.

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
your boot partition as active

$ fdisk -> a /dev/device_name -> w

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.







-- 
In vino veritas.
       [In wine there is truth.]
               -- Pliny
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