F16beta Live CD installs, but won't boot

[chrismurphy]

Brief description: Two problems, one the resulting installation will not boot, I get a "no bootable device" message upon restart. Also, the 500MB boot partition's type code is EF00 (EFI Partition) instead of 8300 which would seem to be a bug.

100% reproducible. Steps for reproducing, starting with Fedora-16-Beta-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso

1. Checksum of ISO and burned DVD-RW confirmed.
2. Boot from DVD.
3. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096 count=34
4. yum install gdisk
5. In gdisk, create a new blank GPT, all unallocated space.
6. Run the installer, and choose default installation type "Replace Existing Linux Systems"
7. Accept the installer default partitioning scheme.
8. Accept the installer default bootloader installation setting to /dev/sda (the only HDD in the computer).
9. Check partition table with gdisk.
10. Restart.

Result:
A. The 500MiB ext4 boot partition is set to type EF00 (and GUID) which is "EFI Partition" rather than 8300 for Linux partition. This seems wrong.
B. That same partition has no partition name.
C. Gray screen for 60 seconds follow by black screen containing text at the top only: No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key.

Regression:
A. Repeated all steps above, but tried "Use All Space" and "Use Free Space" installation types instead; same result with 500MB boot partition getting a type code of EF00, and "no bootable device" on reboot.

B. Used gdisk to change partition type for the boot partition from EF00 to 8300 and reboot. Computer still won't boot.

C. F15 Final Live CD boots, installs and reboots. But of course this is MBR only partitioning, and Grub Legacy.

gdisk version 0.7.2
Hardware is Macbook Pro 4,1. This hardware's EFI support prevents EFI only booting if I want a GUI, so the use of the Live CD is intentional, forcing CSM/BIOS boot.

---------- Post added at 09:27 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:13 PM ----------

The fact I get a "no bootable device" rather than a gray flashing folder with a question mark, tells me that this is probably a message from the CSM/BIOS. CSM boot should blind load GRUB2's boot.img from the first 512 bytes of the disk, then proceed to core.img which includes a rescue shell. But I'm not even getting that far which leads me to believe the problem is either in that first 512 bytes, or core.img isn't installed (correctly.)

[chrismurphy]

Attached screen shot of the first 512 bytes of the disk. Appears Grub2 is there but unclear if it's correctly installed. I'll point out dd was used to zero several MB from the start of the disk each time to make sure I don't end up with crust from previous attempts.

[chrismurphy]

I have a tentative fix. It might be that Apple's EFI requires an MBR with a partition's boot flag set in order to enable the CSM for BIOS booting. OR maybe EFI doesn't hand off the disk to CSM unless the disk contains both MBR and boot flagged partition, and thus the CSM doesn't see a disk to boot from and then pops up the "no bootable device" message.

http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=744496#c4

So now the question is if a pure GPT only disk, with the "Legacy BIOS Bootable" attribute set works.

---------- Post added 10th October 2011 at 12:06 AM ---------- Previous post was 9th October 2011 at 10:55 PM ----------

Nope. Apparently hybrid MBR, with a boot flag set for the linux boot partition (the 500MB ext4 partition mounted at /boot) is required or an Apple Macbook Pro 4,1 (possibly other models) will not boot Fedora 16 with the default installation from the Live CD.

I suspect this probably affects full DVD installations as well.

---------- Post added at 03:13 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:06 AM ----------

Confirmed with F16 beta DVD: the 500MB ext4 /boot partition's type code is set to EF00 but should be 8300. Used gdisk to do that. And then also used it to change the protective MBR to hybrid MBR and set the boot partition's boot flag (an MBR flag). This works for Fedora only and Mac OS X + Fedora dual boot, without rEFIt. Simply use option key on startup and choose the Windows disk and you'll drop into the GRUB2 menu.