# 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.

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## steveb

is the boot partition active?

what is the printout of 

```
fdisk -l /dev/hdX
```

 (replace /dev/hdX with your boot hd)

cheers

SteveB

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## tgoodaire

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

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## steveb

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

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## tgoodaire

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.

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## steveb

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

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## tgoodaire

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

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## tgoodaire

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

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## rommel

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

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## tgoodaire

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.

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