AmiBios not booting my hard drive

tgoodaire

I've gotten through the gentoo installation guide up to the point where I need to reboot. I have compiled my kernel and set up grub. Grub is on a primary partition that is set to bootable. I'm guessing that it's a bios problem, but I'm not sure. When I boot up it says

"Looking for a bootable partition on IDE-0...OK"

And then nothing. I can boot from the gentoo cd and mount the hard drive and everything's ok. For some reason, my bios won't recognize that the hard drive is bootable. I'm hoping that someone else can give my an idea as to what I can try. The only thing that I can think of is flashing the bios.

steveb · Advocate Joined: 18 Sep 2002 Posts: 4564

is the boot partition active?

what is the printout of

tgoodaire · Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2003 6:16 pm Post subject: fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 608 4883728+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 609 4865 34194352+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 609 639 248976 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda6 640 4865 33945313+ 83 Linux

I don't know if this means that /dev/hda is active or not, but it looks like it's bootable. How do I activate it if it's not?

Thanks,
Tim

steveb · Advocate Joined: 18 Sep 2002 Posts: 4564

yes. hda1 is active.
/dev/hda1 * 1 608 4883728+ 83 Linux

the star (*) indicates a active partition.

you can allways deactivate it with fdisk if you want.

however... it does not look like a activation problem.
may i ask you what os or fs did you have bevore installing gentoo on that disk?

cheers

SteveB

tgoodaire · Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2003 7:08 pm Post subject:

I had Windows XP on that disk originally. It's a new motherboard though, and I'm starting to wonder if it may be the problem.

steveb · Advocate Joined: 18 Sep 2002 Posts: 4564

if i remember right, then you probably need to zero some sectors on the first boot disk if you had ntfs runing on that disk. search the forum for more info.
or look in the cd installation guide, chapter 6.1.

cheers

SteveB

tgoodaire · Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2003 12:20 am Post subject: Zeroing partition

Ok. I followed the instructions to zero out the start of the partition, then I repartitioned. I'm going to bootstrap, emerge system, build my kernel, and install it with grub. I'll let you know if this works for me.

Thanks for your help.

Tim

tgoodaire · Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2003 9:41 pm Post subject: Still won't work.

I'm still having the same problem. I think I'll try and flash the bios and see if that helps.

rommel · Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2003 10:14 pm Post subject:

did you install grub? if so try making a grub boot floppy and using it to boot your install , giving it the same params you have in grub.conf

grub> root (hd0,0)

grub> setup (hd0)

grub> kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda6 <anything else you need to pass>

grub> boot

i am thinking this is not your mainboard or its bios but it fails to get a bootloader going

tgoodaire · Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2003 8:16 pm Post subject: Problem solved

It turns out that the problem was that I made my / partition reiser and didn't make a /boot partition. My bios couldn't read the partition table because it was a reiser partition. I figured it out when I booted from a dos floppy, ran fdisk and there were no partitions defined, but cfdisk from the gentoo cd showed that there were partitions.

(Partitioning my hard drives the same way worked on my laptop, which confused me for a while.)

I guess the lesson to learn is that you should create a /boot partition, and it should be ext2.

So tonight, I'll be installing gentoo again on my new partitions. With any luck, I'll be up and running soon!

Thanks for your help and suggestions everyone.