Well it all began when I started to hear a buzzing noise coming from my server. At first I thought it was the fans, but I quickly found out it was the drive. So I figured I would copy everything to a “spare” drive I had around that was being used for backups. Well no matter what I would do I couldn’t get the motherboard to boot from this drive. Oddly, my eeepc and qemu where able to boot from the drive without a problem.
After six hours of trying to swap drives I gave up. The following weekend I remembered that the boot flag needs to be set on the boot partition to get the bios to boot the drive. Sure enough after setting the boot flag in cfdisk the bios booted the drive without a problem.
The BIOS should look for a mbr. If there is a mbr it should attempt to boot the drive. It shouldn’t care about the partition table at all! From what I know, the boot flag is used by the mbr to determine the boot partition. However, grub nor lilo (both linux boot loaders) care about this flag. The windows mbr is the only bootloader in which the flag matters.
My server has an Intel Little Falls board (D945GCLF) which is only about 2 years old so I was quite surprised when I realized the boot flag had to be set.
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