Installing 10.04 to 2TB disk, does not boot

[Preston Hagar]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 12:52 PM, Matthias Brennwald
<matthias at brennwald.org> wrote:
>
> If fails before GRUB shows up. I just get a message saying that there is no bootable disk.
>
>> This might help out in determining if it is an installation problem,
>> disk problem, hardware/bios problem, etc.
>
> In the meantime I found something on the internet which make me believe the problem is related to the motherboard, which needs to be convinced to boot a drive with a GTP partition table on it:
>
>       http://communities.intel.com/thread/9779
>
> However, I do not really understand what the author means by "The trick was to set the partition in the protective mbr as active", and how to do that. What does he mean by "active"? What is the "partition in the protective mbr"? How can I change these things?
>
> Thanks
> Matthias

Try this:

Boot to either a live CD, or your working 160 GB drive with the 2 TB
drive in the machine.  Figure out which drive the 2 TB drive is (fdisk
-l from the command line should list all disks with partition
information, so you can then just look for the one that is 2 TB)

run

parted /dev/sdX

replacing the X with the 2 TB drive.

Once in parted, type print and press enter.

You should see something more or less like this: (my disk is a 320 GB
with 3 partitions)
(parted) print
Model: ATA ST3320620AS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 320GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End    Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      32.3kB  148MB  148MB   primary  ext3         boot, raid
 3      148MB   316GB  316GB   primary               raid
 2      316GB   320GB  4096MB  primary               raid


On the partition that is your boot partition (or if you only have one
partition then that will be it), you want the boot flag like I have on
my #1 partition above.  To turn it on, enter

set X boot on

in parted where X is the partition number.  For example, I would do
set 1 boot on to turn on the boot flag in my partition.

If you already see the boot flag, then this won't help much
unfortunately.    I think you may have already tried this, or this may
be where you currently are, but you might need to make a small boot
partition as your first partition.  Make it say 150 MB or so.  Then
make sure the boot flag is set.  Some motherboards have trouble seeing
past a certain point in large disks, so by making your boot partition
first and set as bootable, it might help.  You might also want to see
if there are any bios updates for your motherboard that might
fix/improve its ability to see and handle large drives.

Hope this helps,

Preston