Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 51
Installer seems to fail to set any partitions bootable
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:48 EDT
After a server install, the installer seems to fail to set any partitions bootable. Some computers need to have a partition marked bootable to boot. :) This failure necessitates booting from floppy, entering fdisk, and setting the first partition bootable before the system can be fully usable.
I was able to install to a machine that currently had NT 4.0 installed on the entire hard drive. I ran the server installation and it correctly created the partitions and was able to boot up normally. Please let use know what the prior configuration was on your system was before you attemmpted the server installation.
No, the problem is with machihnes that have absolutely nothing on them and you want to install Linux all by itself on the machine. In this case, if you use Disk Druid to create your Linux partitions, the first partition is never marked "active" and thus LILO you can't boot after the install. If you are installing Red Hat 5.2 on a machine with some other OS already on it, chances are you will already have a partition marked active and thus you'll never see this problem.
matt/dave: I believe this is still a very valid bug. Please take the bootable flag off all partitions on a drive, and then wipe the partitions, and see if an install works correctly.
I have not been able to replicate this problem in the test lab. I low-leveled the first few tracks of the hard disk as to emulate a brand new hard disk with no information on it and the server install still worked properly.
This has become a very public bug; see Jerry Pournelle's column in this month's resurrected Byte, http://www.byte.com/columns/chaosmanor/1999/030199a.html At the first installfest I attended, one user was stymied by this bug for about an hour, until we realized the installer had failed to mark anything bootable. In neither of the above cases was it a server install. I think it can happen regardless of workstation, custom, or server install. If you can't reproduce it, email me, and I'll try to come up with a recipe.
this bug is getting fixed in our next distribution.
Fixed in the next release.