Bug 752063

I had this problem on a Dell Latitude E6400.  I was trying to install Fedora 16 x86_64 at the time using a DVD.  Creating a BIOS Boot partition in the installer did NOT help in this case.  (It did with an old Dell Optiplex 320 I was installing on.) 

As it turns out, that laptop has an EFI bootloader.  When you select boot methods, it has Legacy and EFI mode.  When I selected EFI mode, I Got this particular issue and was simply unable to continue regardless of my partition layout.  When I rebooted and booted via legacy, this problem disappeared completely. 

So for those of you unable to work around this issue using Anaconda and the partitioning tool, try a non EFI boot mode (if you have one available to you) and see if that helps.

A walkaround tested on VirtualBox to avoid creating a dummy BIOS boot partition:

1. Press ctrl-alt-F2 or Host key-F2 in VirtualBox
2. Access the shell and run "fdisk /dev/sda"
3. Manually partition according to your desire the disk
4. Return back to graphical installer by pressing alt-F6
5. Press the "Reset" button
6. In the new layout loaded, assign ext4 and swap partitions for formatting
7. Press the "Next" button and continue the installation

Here are some related threads, I am having the same issue.  Tried EVERYTHING, no help:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=755226

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1548003

thanks

Got the same error when trying to install Fedora 16 in a QEMU/KVM-virtual machine.
What is the root-cause of that ominous error in the first place? EFI-type BIOS? Since installation of RHEL/SL 6.x is working without a 2 MB bios-boot partition.
And could the error message be reworded to give a hint what is realy expected by the installation procedure? The localized version(s) of this error are a bit more off to make things worse, in German it goes like this: "Sie haben kein Zielgerät für Bootloader Stage 1 eingerichtet", but none such device exists, there is a "Filesystem type" or "Dateisystemtyp" "BIOS Boot" however. Another problem arises if i specify a "BIOS boot" filesystem with a "Size (MB)" of 2 and either "Fixed Size" or "Fill up entire space up to (MB): 2", i everytime get the error message "requested partitions could not be assigned: "partition is too large for BIOS boot formating (allowable size is 0 MB to 2 MB)." The same applies if i enter 1 as size. Entering 0 resets the field to 1 MB. So i can't get it to install.

Oh, went back and fort one time an retried to create the "BIOS boot" filesystem with a size of 1 MB, worked now.

I got this error trying to install Fedora 17 on a machine with UEFI and EFI boot enabled in BIOS. It would not let me continue even though I had an EFI partition marked as such prepared. In the end, I went with BIOS boot but whatever the installer then did left the machine unbootable except via the BIOS boot menu. I finally corrected the mess by hand but I still don't really understand what the installer did. On straight boot, I would get a grub rescue shell but via the BIOS boot menu, I could boot via grub menu.

It seems to be related to UEFI booting. The only thing I could do to get past this point is to go into the BIOS and select BIOS Legacy boot mode only.

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On Fedora 19 (LXDE spin), Anaconda blocks installation with the error message
"you have not created a bootloader stage1 target device"
in the cases where custom partitioning AND "Do not install bootloader" is chosen together with a DOS partition table and Partition scheme set to "Standard partition".

If Anaconda can not handle installation without a dedicated /boot partition, on systems where it is not required (plain BIOS, no RAID/LVM/GPT etc.), it should inform the user directly. (Reading the documentation at https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/19/html/Installation_Guide/s2-diskpartrecommend-x86.html  does not give the impression that a /boot mount partition is always required.)

If the rest of Fedora installation CAN handle having /boot on the / root partition, Anaconda is blocking the installation for no good reason, in some cases

The error given is badly worded, and seems not to be rephrased up to now, in Fedora 19.

"in the cases where custom partitioning AND "Do not install bootloader" is chosen"

are you *sure* you disabled bootloader installation? Because I'm looking at that check right now, and it says:

        if self.bootloader and not self.bootloader.skip_bootloader:
            (perform the check)

i.e., the check seems pretty clearly to be skipped if 'bootloader.skip_bootloader' is set.

Just tested with current F21 anaconda, I can disable bootloader installation and create a custom layout with just swap and / on an msdos labelled disk, and it works fine.