Re: lenovo s205 installation problems
* Tom H <tomh0665@gmail.com> [120207 12:12]:
> On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 6:12 AM, Russell L. Harris
> <rlharris@broadcaster.org> wrote:
>
> Some GPT labelled disks need to have the boot flag set on the
> "bios_grub" partition (in violation of the EFI spec) for a box to be
> bootable. And some Lenovo models are affected.
The latest installation attempt (using the 6.0.4 Netinstall image
burned to DVD) now is hung (5 minutes or longer) at the partition
disks step. The tail end of the log displayed by Alt-F4 consists of
the following messages:
partman: No matching physical volumes found.
partman: No volume groups found.
partman: Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
partman-lvm : No volume groups found.
So I plan to reboot the GParted-Live flash USB (now upgraded to
0.11.0) and experiment.
> "bios_grub"/"bios_boot" is a type/flag like "boot", "lvm", "raid". In
> fdisk/gdisk, you use "t" to set them and in parted you use "set".
Using GParted to partition the drive just prior to this installation
attempt, I created a separate /boot partition as the first partition.
I then used the "manage flags" menu of GParted to set the boot flag.
In addition to the "boot" flag, the menu offered also the "bios-grub"
flag. Should I have set both the "boot" and the "bios-grub" flag for
the partition "/boot"?
> The boot loader code's on "/boot" but the PBR'll have pointers to it.
The term "PBR" is new to me; what does it mean?
> It's the first partition so I guess that you can more or less say that
> it "begins at a pre-defined physical location."
In at least one of the articles I found, the author made it a point to
distinguish between the unformatted "bios-grub" region and a normal
partition mounted at "/boot". From this, I got the impression that both
were optional, except that one or the other must exist.
> You can use a GPT label with a BIOS box. AFAIK, you need to do so
> above a certain disk size.
One or two of the articles which I found gave me the impression that
old-style BIOS would not boot a drive with a GPT. I suppose I need to
search still more on this matter.
> I don't use GParted but it must be like parted; you must have to
> create a GPT label and create an initial partition with a bios_grub
> flag manually.
I naively assumed that the "G" stood for "GNU", but I was mistaken.
The GNU version is "parted", and "Gparted" is the Gnome version. But
at the moment I haven't the foggiest notion of which is the better.
This calls for more reading...
Thanks for the corrections.
RLH
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