How to make SSD bootable?
 

Hi all. I have a post over at SSD Review Forums trying to set my Crucial M4 SSD as bootable so as I can boot straight into Fedora 15 without having to chainload from a Fedora 14 Grub installation.

For some reason, and I am trying to find out why, I cannot boot directly into my SSD from the bios of my DFI-NF4-SLI mobo (yes its an old one but that shouldn't matter because SSD's are supposed to act independently of the mobo.)

Here is a fdisk -l print out. My SSD is sdc and grub is installed in sda1 which is listed by fdisk as bootable.

I'm not sure if /dev/sdc1 which is marked as bootable according to fdisk is actually bootable. It is aligned properly according to Stevea's thread about setting up SSD's but it is a bit confusing to me to be honest.

Here is my Grub.conf from my SSD with a working Fedora 15 installation (which I am using to write this right now). So my install works, I just can't boot directly into it directly from the Bios of my mobo. Title previous links back to the Fedora 14 Grub menu.

Because Fedora only uses Grub Legacy and not Grub2, I am stuck using MBR as the 'partiton table' ??? and not GPT which most other Linux distro's have moved to. I read that over at ArchLinux Forums. So, I checked that with gdisk, output ...

From this I assume I have a valid partition table capable of booting my SSD. ??? Am I wrong?

When I select to boot from my Crucial M4 in bios, I get Nada... nothing. The bios load stops. But, if I select my Fedora 14 disk which is sdb, with a bootable MBR then I can chainload through to my SDD and the second grub install and can subsequently select to boot into Fedora 15.

Clear as mud?? Please someone help... I'm going batty.

I can't figure out what you are trying to accomplish.

Do you want no grub displayed and to boot directly into F15 using the latest kernel?

If you would like to have your SSD the first disk in your boot priority in BIOS, marking the partition bootable is not necessary, but installing a bootloader into the MBR of your SSD is.

Have you done this?

You state that you have grub installed in the MBR of sda, controlled by F14, but do you have grub installed to the MBR of sdc?

Solved
 

I am simply trying to boot a SSD directly rather than chainloading off of a previous installation.

The problem is now solved.

Fedora 15 has an option when setting the bootloader (grub) to specify a hard drive layout independent of how the motherboard bios presents hard drives. It's actually fairly straight forward, but not until settings have been changed.

You can specify which root partition to install Grub to, AS WELL AS a specific MBR - REGARDLESS of the boot order of the hard drives as presented by the mobo. This is so that if you decide to move your drives around to a different boot order, your system is still bootable. I didn't know this when installing Fedora 15. It has changed from what I was familiar with in my previous install.

After your tip about the MBR I went back to try and reinstall Grub, but screwed it up in the process; couldn't be bothered rescuing it, and reinstalled instead which is when I took a closer look at the new Fedora booting options.

Thankyou for your help. You were the first person to offer advice even though I actually have this post in Fedora Forums. Much appreciated.

You're welcome.

Glad to be of help.