On 22/01/2025 21:49, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
On Wed, Jan 22, 2025 at 2:23 PM Steve Underwood <coppice12@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I just bought a new SSD, installed Fedora 41 on it to occupy the whole
disk, and it wouldn't boot. I tried Debian 12 and again it wouldn't
boot. I then tried Debian 11 and all was well. Afterwards I checked and
the Fedora 41 and Debian 12 installers are not setting the boot flag in
the MBR. Is there a good reason why these newer installers are doing
this, or is it a bug? Since there seems to be no warning to check this
flag after the install is complete it certainly feels like a bug.
Switch to GPT. MBR is so 1990's. GPT does not need an active, bootable
partition. It happens automatically with ESP. And GPT is not limited
to four partitions.
Then, reload the operating system.
Jeff
I thought I'd post a follow up about this, after doing more installs.
I agree that the time of the MBR should have passed for any hardware
that is not ancient. I thought that Fedora 41 and Debian 12 were putting
an MBR on the disc, because they had decided the old machines I was
using could not handle a GPT disc, and UEFI boot. However, it appears
both these installers will put an MBR on any disc of 2TB or less, even
on the most modern machines, unless you force them not to with command
line parameters as you boot the installer. Without forcing they use an
MBR, but they don't set the boot flag. Maybe the testers use larger
discs, and have not noticed this, although I would have expected a lot
of testing to be done with SSDs these days, and anything over 2TB is
still quite pricey. An interesting problem for two independent
installation systems to have.
Regards,
Steve
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