F16 - Install DVD will not boot

Mikademus · #1 20th November 2011, 12:02 AM

Trying to boot the 64 bit DVD (ISO checksum verified; burned on two different media, both verified against source) has failed on two different computers, both of which runs previous versions of Fedora. I found a thread on a Fedora forum (lost the link) to change the UEFI setting (UEFI is a BIOS replacement), which I tried, but that didn't make a difference. Therefore it seems that there might something problematic with Fedoras current install process, or in this case, even with the path to starting an installation.

To reiterate:
1) ISO verified against official checksums.
2) Burned to two different DVD-RW:s on slow speed.
3) Content of burned DVD verified against ISO image.
4) Install failed to boot on two different computers.

~~The only thing in common is that both are HP laptops.~~

The error unfortunately persisted and I had to install using preupdate instead of the install DVD.

frank7d2 · #2 21st November 2011, 02:20 PM

I also could not boot the F16 64 DVD on a 2.5 yrs old HP laptop 2230s Core2duo.

If the DVD is in the drive the computer just hangs. On a HP Elite 8560p laptop unpacked yesterday, all is fine.

The 2230s also hangs when the DVD is in an external DVD Drive.
So I made a cd with F16 64 netinst. The 2230s laptop hangs, the other laptop boots. So I tried a USB stick with the netinst.iso, I try the usb stick made by unetbootin.
The HP 2230s hangs, the other laptop boots...

I have been using f12 13 14 15 64bit on this hp 2230s. I use an f14 64 on an sd card made with unetbootin for maintenace boots (grow LVs e.g.). Booting from an F14 usb stick works as well.

I wanted to avoid the preupgrade but I also do not see any other option anymore. Exept booting over the network.
In the bios setup UEFI-boot is disabled. The harddrive is MBR.

Mikademus · #3 21st November 2011, 07:08 PM

Yeah, identical to my situation. Will add that the two models that I've tried to install to is an HP Elite 8530 and an ASUS F6Ve.

**AdamW** · #4 21st November 2011, 10:50 PM

we haven't really changed the process by which a Fedora DVD boots much if at all between F15 and F16, so this is an odd issue.

do Fedora live images work?

When you say 'it hangs', where, exactly, does it hang? How far does the boot process get? What do you see?

frank7d2 · #5 22nd November 2011, 09:00 AM

How far does the boot process proceed:
On the HP 2230s (newest 'Bios' F10 since june 2010)
If the dvd, cd, usb stick f16 64 is present at power on: If you type <esc> immediately after power on, for the 'start up menu', the system does not proceed to the start up menu. It waits indefinetely, the hard disk led and the optical drive led flashing fast.

In the meantime, I managed to upgrade from F15 booting the f16 64 DVD this way:
1- optical drive door open, with F16 64 DVD or F16 64 netinst CD
2- power on
3- hit <esc> for the startup menu
4- in the startup menu, choose <F9> for 'Boot Options'
5- the item 'notebook upgrade bay' (or similar wording) is always there, whether there is a medium present or not.
6- close the drive door
7- type <Enter> The DVD or CD menu appears

I could upgrade without any problem.

I had however gone to the bios setup before and looked for settings. I did disable USB legacy settings. Probably no relation, but I did not check the boot process again with this setting set to 'Enabled' as before.

However, you can not boot from USB media, as there is no entry for it in the 'Boot Options' menu, when the system does not find the media after power on.

**AdamW** · #6 22nd November 2011, 07:07 PM

huh. that's very odd. honestly not sure where the problem lies there. may be a BIOS issue.

Mikademus · #7 24th November 2011, 12:03 AM

For my HP identical to what was described above: the CD boot process starts, which leads to two LEDs starting flashing, indicating an boot error.

For the ASUS, after attempting to boot the DVD and failing, it falls back to booting the HD system (F15), but incredibly sluggishly, as if the failed DVD boot affected the subsequent boot process.

There seems to be other similar account of this on this forum, too, so while it doesn't seem common, given the install base of Fedora it will likely affect be a significant number of users.

chrismurphy · #8 24th November 2011, 05:24 AM

I have found Grub Legacy EFI to be flakier than Grub2 EFI, while others have reported the opposite. It's probably hardware specific so if one doesn't work then the other might.

I think booting and installing computers in general is going to be more complicated for the foreseeable future because we have multiple permutations of firmware, bootloader, and disk label (partition map scheme). I'd diplomatically characterize it as a complete clusterF*. The possibilities:

BIOS, legacy grub, mbr
BIOS, grub2, mbr
BIOS, grub2, gpt
UEFI, legacy grub efi, mbr (bad idea even if you get it to work)
UEFI, legacy grub efi, gpt
UEFI, grub2, mbr (bad idea again)
UEFI, grub2, gpt
UEFI + CSM, legacy grub, mbr (bad idea)
UEFI + CSM, legacy grub, gpt
UEFI + CSM, grub2, mbr (bad idea)
UEFI + CSM, gru2, gpt

That's 7 ways to boot at a very basic level, eliminating the bad ideas. UEFI + CSM is the same thing as UEFI-boot=disabled. I think it should be avoided. CSM (BIOS emulation) should not work better than the computers native firmware. In effect you have two firmwares, first UEFI and then the CSM layered on top of that. That's inherently more complicated and prone to encountering a bug in one of those firmware implementations.

*CSM=Compatibility Support Module

Mikademus · #9 1st December 2011, 07:58 PM

Chris, thank you for your reply. Looking over the forum since my last visit and post it seems a number of other users have similar issues, which I suspect might be the proverbial tip of an iceberg. Perhaps this is a good thing in that a critical issue has been brought to the surface and the Fedora release process will be forced to take the boot problematic into consideration. And perhaps then I will be able to boot the F17 DVD?

Anyway, I wonder if this is the same issue that is listed under "hardware" in the Common F16 Bugs wiki page:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common..._fails_to_boot

That heading suggests that this issue is limited to Lenevo S205, but if it is the same then all HP Elitebooks (which is a very common professional portable workstation series) will fail to install too, and this should be reflected in the bugs page.

chrismurphy · #10 1st December 2011, 08:37 PM

Possible. I don't understand the exact point where boot is failing. It sounds firmware related to me, but I am not an expert in this area by any means. There are a number of things that happen in the boot process, firmware, grub, kernel and initramfs loading then starting - I'm not sure where it's being halted. I would think that is minimum information needed to solve the problem for F17 or even a work around for F16 in the meantime.

So someone with affected hardware needs to volunteer to do more work; i.e poking their computer with a stick and reporting the results in the forum. The forum can certainly help with providing sticks for poking! (i.e. here, try this, what happens?)

Mikademus · #11 2nd December 2011, 04:22 PM

Well, as a start I can tell that when things go wrong on the HP Elitebook it goes wrong very early, before the kernel has started loading. When the two indicator lights start flashing on the HP it is an indicator something is wrong with the boot device and the bootstrap process itself. Flashing lights like this (as well as speaker beeps) has always been the way the BIOS (and BIOS replacements too, I wager) reports boot errors.

srs5694 · #12 2nd December 2011, 04:42 PM

The CD/DVD boot process itself is rather weird. Basically, the disc holds an image file of a floppy disk or a small hard disk. The firmware reads this image file and boots from it as if it were a physical disk. This method of booting is defined by a standard called "El Torito," which works well for most modern BIOS-based computers, but its devolopment a decade or so ago was riddled with problems. A complication today is with EFI-based computers, since that requires changes to El Torito to enable such systems to boot. This seems to cause complications for some systems, although I haven't looked into it in enough detail to fully understand it.

One way to work around this problem, which has worked for some people, is to eliminate the complications of El Torito by using Unetbootin to create a bootable USB flash drive from your optical disc. This should be bootable in BIOS mode, and might be bootable in EFI mode (I've not checked this detail for Fedora). Even if it's not bootable in EFI mode, you could make it so by adding or adjusting the EFI boot loader on the flash drive and/or on the hard disk's EFI System Partition (ESP). Thus, going this route gives you a boot method (via GRUB) with which you may be more familiar, and it's easier to tweak and test than on a CD or DVD.

**AdamW** · #13 2nd December 2011, 07:38 PM

We do not recommend using unetbootin to create USB boot images; we can't update unetbootin for any changes to the Fedora images as it's a third party tool and I've seen it cause all sorts of problems before.

The preferred method for creating a Fedora USB stick is to use livecd-iso-to-disk. If you want the created stick to be bootable natively via EFI you can pass the --efi parameter. You can also create images with dd, but they won't be EFI bootable (and in general may have issues livecd-iso-to-disk don't have, as we can use the livecd-iso-to-disk process to 'customize' the created stick a bit, like labelling it so that anaconda knows it's a Fedora USB image).

**AdamW** · #14 2nd December 2011, 07:41 PM

The S205 issue mentioned in Common Bugs really is specific to the S205. There were several bugs reported on the S205 and in talking to the owners of that hardware, and googling around for other threads about it, it became painfully obvious that the system firmware on that specific system was just badly, badly broken: people have all sorts of problems attempting to do _any_ kind of OS install on it, whether that's Fedora, Ubuntu or any other OS, or even a reinstall of Windows from stock discs. It just seems to be a badly screwed up system. So yeah, that entry is intentionally very specific to the S205.

Of course it's possible other systems have firmware issues which might stop Fedora images booting, but it's unlikely they'd be _exactly the same problem_ the S205 firmware has, whatever it is (my current working theory is that it doesn't handle efibootmgr commands correctly and creates corrupted EFI boot manager entries).