So ultimately I got it to work after spending 10 hours of my life, and not knowing exactly what was the problem. Eh, well, I'm happy for now.
Thanks for all your help.
]]>It is a fairly new laptop bought in March 2012...
]]>I know the command would be different with an MBR...
Perhaps I shouldn't have used GPT again this time, that was unwise. It's still not booting to it, even with a separate /boot partition.
Now I am completely lost. I thought we were talking about an MBR this time
]]>Perhaps I shouldn't have used GPT again this time, that was unwise. It's still not booting to it, even with a separate /boot partition.
]]>I'm going to try again using GPT and syslinux but with a separate /boot partition, we'll see where that gets me.
]]>Okay, lets move on. The big question is, why does the BIOS not find the boot loader. This happens long before the kernel gets involved, so lets solve that first.
**** Warning, I am not an authority on GPT or on Syslinux ***
I would install syslinux using the manual method described in the Wiki.
Having said that, the dd command is dangerous. It breaks things. It will destroy data at the slightest typo.
I've "started over" twice now and it's not the easiest install process ever so I'd prefer not to, and besides how else should I create my partition layout - with all three partitions as primary, without using extended/logical?
Another part is the boot and root partition is both ext4... should /boot at least be ext2?
]]>I expect the extended partition to be type 'f'
Boot is huge. Is that a combined boot and root partition.
Also I removed syslinux and installed grub2, still no boot. So I'm not sure what's missing here...
]]>I may try grub2 in a bit just to see. It really sucks though if that's the case, I liked syslinux much better. But I'll try. Oh, right fdisk, here...
http://sprunge.us/SFCf