Arch Linux

sneaksie

Member

Registered: 2009-11-12

Posts: 31

"no primary partitions marked bootable" partition error

Hey,

I tried Arch some time ago and liked it, then I became curious about other distribution and checked them out. Now, I'd like to return to Arch, but while installing, I had trouble partitioning my harddrives.

My whole sda is Windows, it's bootable and I don't want it to be touched.

On sdb ist looks something like this

sdb? a bit free space
sdb4 logically Windows
sdb5 logically Linux Swap
sdb6 logically Linux Swap
sdb1 Primary Linux ext 3
sdb3 Primary Linux ext3

I wanted to install the main sytem to sdb1, so I set the bootflag there. sdb3 is supposed to be my /home directory.

When I tried to write this, I got an error:

no primary partitions marked bootable. DOS MBR cannot boot this

What am I doing wrong? This problem didn't occur in the previous releases of Arch. Has it something to do with the 1024 cylinders boot limitation. I thought these times were over.

Can I solve this by setting the boot flag to the free space or the windows partition? Would that change anything on my windows partition?

I'm glad for any answer. I searched this forum, but couldn't find anything similar. Please help.

grey

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2007-08-23

Posts: 679

Re: "no primary partitions marked bootable" partition error

You can happily ignore this message, but it's still odd that you get it at all, since you have set sdb1 as bootable. How exactly did you plan to set up the boot mechanism for your system?

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