Hi,
I have a question about the laptop installation.
To make the long story short:
1. I have two laptops which have Centos 7 in it.
2. I tried to install the slacker into both. I wiped all the current centos partitions with fdisk and created new ones for the slacker. There is no Windows partition in both.
3. Here is the problem: I could not make / partition bootable with fdisk "a" command.
4. The OS was installed but can not boot from the harddrive


Any help will be greatly appreciated

Best

Are you using lilo/elilo or grub?

Hi,
Thanks for the reply
I used lilo.

Thanks

How old is the laptop?

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.
~10 YEARS

Hi,
In cfdisk, they have more partition types than they used to be.

I think I have figured out the problem.
It has to do with "gpt" partition. I will try if using cgdisk would solve the problem.

Best

A while ago i had the same problem and eventually found that slackware was installing onto a partition which was formatted for windows.

So check the partition's formatting.

If it is wrong, make sure you format the partition.

With a quick loot at the man page for fdisk I could not find a "a" command/switch. Nor could google tell me what the "a" command does.

Edit to add. Where is the process of booting does the laptop stop?

If your getting "unknown command" The drive is probably gpt instead of msdos/mbr.

With the laptop being 10 years old there is a good chance it is not uefi enabled, and needs a mdos/mbr type disk label instead of gpt.
If is gpt disk label, to keep from doing a complete re-install try this and see if this works
change accordingly if drive isn't sda

If that doesn't work the other option is to use gdisk recovery option g to convert drive from gpt to mbr.

Now I am very shaky grounds knowledge-wise here but can't you use gpt on a non-uefi enabled system? I really am not sure so rather than challenging your statement I am actually after some clarity in my own mind .

Yes, but some older systems require a boot flag to be set. The code in post 9 sets a boot flag in the protective mbr. The hybrid option in gdisk does something similar. On some uefi systems setting a boot flag on the pmbr will prevent the system from booting in uefi mode.

On a side note a 1mb partition flagged bios-grub is needed if grub is the boot loader. The partition isn’t needed with lilo

Yes, you can. A gpt disk has a "protective" mbr and LILO can go into that as usual. If you are using GRUB, it's a bit more complicated. The first stage of GRUB goes into the protective mbr but you need to have a "BIOS boot partition" as partition 1 to store the second stage. On an mbr disk, that fits into the gap between the mbr and the first partition, but gpt disks don't have that gap.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi,
Thank you so much for all the replies.
It has been a very long while since I have installed Slackware. Anyway going back to my problem.
1. I have my laptop booted from UEFI only and CSM enabled in the BIOS settings
2. I used gdisk to partition my harddisk gpt table;
\dev\sda1 \BIOS Partition
\dev\sda2 \EFI Partition System
\dev\sda3 \Linux 64 root
\dev\sda4 \Linux home
\dev\sda5 Swap


3. Went to setup, and I got a complaint about
"Linux partition is not detected"

Any clue on what is going on.

Thanks

I am following this thread closely. My laptop has "experimental" uefi boot and I have not been successful implementing it.

My sig has my laptop details

If you use lilo for legacy boot, you will need elilo for native. Do you have it installed?