The new Gentoo Handbook (installation instructions) is missing key information that exists in the old installation instructions. Under section "4.c. Using fdisk on x86 to Partition your Disk", and then subsection "Creating the Boot Partition", there should be a note about telling fdisk to enable the /boot partition as "bootable". As stated, these instructions exist in the old installation documents, but are missing from the Gentoo Handbook. It should say something like this (from the old documentation): --------------- Finally, we need to set the "bootable" flag on our boot partition and then write our changes to disk. To tag /dev/hda1 as a "bootable" partition, type a at the menu and then type in 1 for the partition number. If you type p now, you'll now see that /dev/hda1 has a * in the "Boot" column. --------------- FYI: I have NOT checked the other architecture sections to see if they also contain this bug/ommission. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
Created attachment 21500 [details, diff] Patch to hb-install-disk.xml This patch should take care of this. If a docdev can review?
patch looks good
Thanks. Patch committed. Thanks for the feedback, Greg!
is that really necessary? in the forums there are a lot of people having problems with booting and many of them ask about this bootable-flag. at least with grub and lilo on x86 you don't need it. adding this step will make installation one step more complicated. when they run into problems they will consider this step as a probable source of the error, which is misleading. imho you cannot do anything wrong with this bootable-flag, so why should we make people bother about it? if this is different on other architectures feel free to ignore me. p.s.: since i'm quite new to the bugsending world i'm not sure if it's adequate to post to a closed bug and if i should reopen it.
I believe the bootable flag is important, just not always. My laptop requires it (even though it only has a Linux installation, no Windows or other OS) but my desktop doesn't (even though both have almost identical setups). On bugreporting: you can reopen it if you believe the fix was/is flawed or should be reverted. Creating a new one isn't adviseable as it may lead to be marked as duplicate of this (resolved fixed) bugreport without further action.
