Description of problem: I have a dual-boot Vista/Fedora machine with Grub on the MBR. Sometimes, Vista expects its partition to be active, for example when upgrading to SP2. AFAICT (but I may be wrong) Fedora doesn't seem to care whether its partition is active. But the Fedora installer switches the active partition away from Windows anyway. Here is the output of fdisk -l on F11 before doing a clean install of F12: Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x031a25b1 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 10444 83886080 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 10444 10469 204800 83 Linux /dev/sda3 10469 30401 160103424 8e Linux LVM and after: Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x031a25b1 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 10444 83886080 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 * 10444 10469 204800 83 Linux /dev/sda3 10469 30401 160103424 8e Linux LVM I believe the same thing happened when doing a clean install of F11. Please close this bug if there is a good reason for this behavior that I'm not aware of. However, in this case there should probably be some kind of warning in the release notes. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): anaconda-12.46-2.fc12
Hi, The main reason we are doing this is for when installing to the boot sector of a partition instead of to the mbr. And when installing to the bootsector of a partition and assuming default mbr boot code (*), which will boot the first active partition, is present in the mbr, then we must set the active / bootable flag, otherwise one might very well end up with a not bootable system. So we could decide to not do the active flag setting when installing into the MBR, but this is rather (x86) platform specific and the setting of the boot flag might be necessary on other platforms with other bootloaders then grub, so things are probably best left as is. *) as written by dos for eons and as written by parted when creating a fresh mbr.
Fixed actually, see bug 533658
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 533658 ***