"No Bootable device found" after installing F11

[fuser]

Hi, all

I'm new to fedora and this is my first post here on fedoraforums .

Well I downloaded the DVD ISO, burned it and installed fedora smoothly, but at the end of the installation and after rebooting a message came on the screen saying :"No bootable device found, press F1 to retry again, F2 to go to the system setup or F5 ... "

I installed it on a Dell Inspiron 6400 with 2.0GHz Core Duo processor, 1GB RAM and 120GB HDD partitioned as follow:

40GB -> Windows XP (NTFS)
----------------------------
200MB -> /boot (ext3)
20GB -> / (ext4)
2GB -> /swap
50GB -> used for my personal stuff (NTFS)

During the installation of GRUB I set it to be on /boot partition rather than the MBR.

I tried using the Rescue Installed System option from the DVD and wrote fdisk -l, It showed me the partitions with the /boot partition having (*), which - i guess - means that it is the active partition and my system should boot from it. but It didn't.

When I couldn't figure out what to do, I used FDISK from my win ME startup cd to make the 1st partition (C active so that I can log into windows . And here I'm back to windows and it's operating as it did before the installation without any changes.

So the question is, why did this message appear? and how can I fix this problem so as to use F11

thanks in advance

[sonoran]

Hello fuser-

Is the info in your post accurate - the /boot partition should be ext3 filesystem. The version of grub Fedora is using cannot boot from an ext4 partition. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ext4_...upport_Ext4.3F

Since your install went smoothly you can reinstall and switch the filesystems - make /boot ext3 and everything else ext4. Or if you don't want to reinstall everything, you can (I think) run gparted from the dvd rescue mode, reformat the /boot partition to ext3, and then reinstall grub there.

Welcome to Fedora Forum!

[fuser]

sorry, my mistake.. /boot is ext3 and / is ext4.. I noticed the ext4 option is not available if the mount point is set to /boot..

[sonoran]

Okay. I subsequently read that F11 won't allow /boot to be formatted ext4.

A number of people seem to be having this problem with multi-boot installations:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=223747

There are several good solutions in there that might work for you if you haven't tried already.

[fuser]

Finally I managed to boot into fedora

I just reinstalled it again with the boot loader installed on the MBR not the boot sector of the boot partition and it worked.

Don't really know why it didn't boot - openSUSE 11.1 didn't either - when it was configured to be on the boot partition

thanks sonoran