On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 08:19:39AM +0530, Rustom Mody wrote: > On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 12:35 AM, Colin Watson <cjwat...@debian.org> wrote: > > On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 11:05:07PM +0530, Rustom Mody wrote: > >> I moved my boot partition to a logical sector > >> Running dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc said it had gone through without error > >> However the disk remained unbootable until a primary (or extended) > >> partition > >> was flagged as bootable > >> > >> It would be good if grub install were to warn about installing to a logical > >> partition with bootable flag set > > > > I don't think this is any of GRUB's business, honestly. GRUB itself > > doesn't care whether the partition is marked bootable or not. If > > anything cares, it will be your BIOS - but only some BIOSes care about > > this. > > Exactly so -- in a logical world! > Unfortunately Intel boards/BIOSes sometimes treat as unbootable a disk > in which the bootable flag is on in a logical partition -- not so > logical :D
Yes, I'm aware of that. I'm not sure how that makes it any of GRUB's business, though - GRUB doesn't touch the bootable flag (unless explicitly told to) and doesn't itself care about how it's set. > Also I agree that this is not a debian problem but primarily a grub > issue so maybe I take it up there? What I just said above was that this isn't a GRUB problem. GRUB is not causing the problem (the BIOS would refuse to boot *any* boot loader, not just GRUB). I don't think it makes any more sense to handle it in GRUB upstream than it would to handle it in Debian GRUB. Wouldn't the correct place to issue a warning be in the partitioning software that allowed you to create this partition layout? That seems more sensible and useful to me. > In summary: a recipe for those reaching here through a search engine: > 1. grub-install makes an unbootable system if a logical partition is > marked as bootable No. Your system was unbootable anyway due to the partition layout, regardless of the boot loader that's installed. grub-install merely does not help. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
