Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 59238
Boot loader partition not set bootable
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:39:42 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.7) Gecko/20011226 Description of problem: If user elects to install GRUB or LILO in a partition instead of the MBR, an option to make that partition bootable should be provided. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install Red Hat Linux (graphical install) on a machine with Windows already installed. 2. When given the option of where to install GRUB, choose /boot partition instead of MBR. 3. At completion of install, reboot without boot diskette. Actual Results: Boots directly to Windows. Must boot with diskette or Rescue CD, run fdisk, and set active partition manuallyto give GRUB control of the next boot. Expected Results: User should have the option to make /boot active if GRUB is installed there. Then on reboot, GRUB would get control of boot. Additional info: In some cases, the reason for putting GRUB in /boot is to continue using another boot loader (such as WinNT's) that gives the option of selecting a system to boot. But there are other reasons for doing this. My laptop's suspend-to-disk feature requires the standard MBR to function correctly, so GRUB must be installed elsewhere--but I still want GRUB to control the boot.
Did you have an active partition on the drive prior to installing Linux? The boot partition should get marked active as long as you don't have another active partition; there are some bootloaders (bootmagic does this iirc) that just install themselves in small active partitions, so we don't change the active partition if one is already set.
I don't recall exactly now, but it is possible that the suspend-to-disk partition was active. There were some oddities about that when I was putting that partition together and testing it before the Linux install. The default behavior sounds reasonable, but it still might be nice if the user had the option to override it.
In most cases, the user will just get confused by something like that... fdisk is there for the corner cases.