BIOS won't boot freshly installed Arch [solved]

luther7hrol · 2014-10-27 12:58:34

Hello

Last night I did a complete wiping of my hard drive on my old HP620 laptop in order to start my ideal Arch setup from the scratch.
I decided to give GPT a try, since I've been sick of the brain damaged MBR all those years. I did the install as usual, using cgdisk
to partition the drive within the freshly created GUID partition table. I made up 5 partitions, with the leading 1MiB BIOS boot partition,
which I created inside the first 40-2047 sector boundaries and set it to type ef02.

Everything has been alligned properly and passed without any errors. I partitioned the drive as follows:

quetzalcoatl% sudo gdisk -l /dev/sda
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.10

Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/sda: 625142448 sectors, 298.1 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): 1DC6DA85-2730-4101-ADA1-69EA884CC1B7
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 625142414
Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries
Total free space is 362996373 sectors (173.1 GiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1              40            2047   1004.0 KiB  EF02  
   2            2048        52430847   25.0 GiB    8300  
   3        52430848        85985279   16.0 GiB    8300  
   4        85985280        94373887   4.0 GiB     8200  
   5        94373888       262146047   80.0 GiB    8302

sda1 is BIOT boot partition, sda2 is /, sda3 is reiserfs /var, sda4 for swap and sda5 is /home.

I formated every partition prior to mounting and installing the base system, except for sda1 which
I left intact (no formatting, just the cgdisk part of creating and chosing type).

At the end, I did the grub installation and configuration:

pacman -S grub-bios
grub-install --target=i386-pc --recheck /dev/sda
pacman -S os-prober
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

after which I unmounted and rebooted, but the BIOS refused to boot into the system. It came up with the "Non
system disk or disk error". The only way of booting into the system remains to use the Arch installation CD,
and chose "Boot from hard drive" option.

I tried adding the boot flag to the BIOS boot partition using "parted /dev/sda set1 bios_grub on", and even faking
and adding bootable flag to BIOS boot partition using the MBR's fdisk since gdisk hasn't got the option to.
Nothing helped.

Pacman says GRUB version is grub 1:2.02.beta2-4. Should I try going with syslinux or my BIOS (which I hadn't been updating at all)
is perhaps too old or buggy to cope with the GPT? I don't want to convert to MBR, if technically would be possible to boot using GPT.

What should I do?
Thanks in advance,

Luth

Last edited by luther7hrol (2014-11-05 15:55:28)

mrunion · 2014-10-27 13:01:29

It sounds like you want to use a GPT partition, therefore you should be using UEFI boot, not BIOS. If your machine isn't capable of UEFI booting, then you don't need (can't use) GPT partitions.

luther7hrol · 2014-10-27 13:15:00

I think my machine is kind of too old to use UEFI boot, since I don't remember finding any UEFI option in system/BIOS configuration. Or maybe I am wrong, since I've just found a HP UEFI support environment application on HP's site. Of course the only OSes to support is the M$ family. I wonder if there is any way to do this using Linux? If not, is there a way of flawlessly turning GPT to MBR without losing the data?

Moo-Crumpus · 2014-10-27 14:11:54

Yes, but on your own risk . By the way ... did you say reiserfs??? Weird.

Last edited by Moo-Crumpus (2014-10-27 14:14:03)

luther7hrol · 2014-10-27 14:41:34

Thanks. I used reiserfs only for var partition, since I've read there is a performance gain over ext4 when caching, why is this weird?

CarlD · 2014-10-28 10:13:31

Hi Luther,

As the thread hasn't been marked as solved I hope this will help:

1. The standard partition table type used by BIOS systems is MBR/MSDOS. Any PC released prior to Windows 8 should be a BIOS system. GPT is a newer partition table type used as standard with UEFI systems (i.e. post Windows 8). To make life simple, it is recommended to stick to the standard partition type appropriate for your system.

2. The performance gain you would get using Reiserfs - I suspect - would be negligable. Ext2/3/4 would be a better choice, particularly as they are easy to use and are very popular (i.e. better chance of getting advice and support if you need it).

luther7hrol · 2014-10-28 15:50:00

Thanks CarlID. I'll stick to the MBR, although not very gladly, since I've been sick after all those years of messing with extended and logical partitions, especially in the situations I triple-boot various uni*es (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux)... :-)

I think I'll do another from-the-ground-zero installation, right after trying to convert for the sake of clarity.

Last edited by luther7hrol (2014-10-28 15:51:10)

Arch Linux

#1 2014-10-27 12:58:34

BIOS won't boot freshly installed Arch [solved]

#2 2014-10-27 13:01:29

Re: BIOS won't boot freshly installed Arch [solved]

#3 2014-10-27 13:15:00

Re: BIOS won't boot freshly installed Arch [solved]

#4 2014-10-27 14:11:54

Re: BIOS won't boot freshly installed Arch [solved]

#5 2014-10-27 14:41:34

Re: BIOS won't boot freshly installed Arch [solved]

#6 2014-10-28 10:13:31

Re: BIOS won't boot freshly installed Arch [solved]

#7 2014-10-28 15:50:00

Re: BIOS won't boot freshly installed Arch [solved]

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