No boot flag on any partition - Failure to boot after install - Intel motherboards

[Nico]

This bug may be because of a specific hardware behaviour only.

This bug should maybe be attached to the partition manager used by Ubiquity.

On an Intel DG965WH motherboard, after a regular and non-problematic install of Feisty AMD64 from the Desktop CD, at first boot, the BIOS says it cannot find any bootable device.

The problem is resolved by using a live CD and setting the proper partition with the boot flag using fdisk, cfdisk or the Gnome Partition Manager.

The same problem was related using an Intel 975-based motherboard (http://dev.osso.nl/herman/blog/2007/05/18/got-new-hardware-yay-doesnt-even-boot/#comment-24680) using the same fix.

I will be testing using the Alternate install CD.

Additional info and specific dumps can be generated upon request.

Hurry, though, as I will want to make this system production at some point.

Nico

[Herman Bos (hbos)]

I can confirm this bug. I installed feisty with the i386 desktop cd and couldn't boot afterwards. Setting the root partition with the boot flag fixed it. I attached lspci just in case it might be useful. This problem also exists with the lastest BIOS version for the Intel DG965WH.

[Nico (nico-rdo)]

Oh, I missed this one during the original scan for existing bugs.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/113370

Sounds like a duplicate.

I had also done a manual partitioning. I had also not cared about a bootflag.

Nico

[Joseph Price (pricechild)]

I filed this bug in 113370 and so I'm confirming it here.

[Peter Adolphs (futzilogik)]

I've installed Ubuntu on a machine with Intel D946GZIS mainboard (Intel 946G chipset), using the Feisty AMD64 Desktop CD. I've manually partitioned the hard disk using Ubuntu's fdisk as follows:

/dev/sda1 HPFS/NTFS (empty)
/dev/sda2 Extended
/dev/sda5 swap
/dev/sda6 ext3 /

I didn't set a bootable flag on any partition since Ubuntu uses grub, which ignores the boot flag. The installation completed without any error messages. However, the system didn't boot (grub never showed up) until I've set the bootable flag on the (still empty) /dev/sda1 partition.

[Herman Bos (hbos)]

The BIOS in these mainboards seems to check for the bootable flag. So that would also explain the behavior Peter Adolphs explains.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for your report. This is also bug 14244, and is fixed in Hardy.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

(In fact, it's largely fixed in Gutsy, but now the autopartitioner is aware of this too which allows us to eliminate some related problems.)