Fedora 16 failing to boot on an Intel D975XBX2 motherboard

I recently upgraded to Fedora 16 on my desktop PC, and had the unpleasant experience – which I can’t remember having for many years on Linux – that after a successful installation, it simply failed to boot. I was pretty surprised, but the Fedora common bugs page has an entry “Some systems…cannot boot GPT labelled disks“. Although it doesn’t mention Intel motherboards, this does seem to apply to mine, since the workaround described – marking the protective MBR entry as active – did work, and allowed the system to boot.

Anyway, maybe someone else will find this useful. There is a D975XBX2 BIOS update available (my machine was using revision 2770, some revisions back from the latet) so I guess I’ll try that sometime and see if it fixes the problem, although there is nothing obvious in the BIOS release changelog about it.

3 Responses to “Fedora 16 failing to boot on an Intel D975XBX2 motherboard”

  1. Brian says:

    I’m still using Fedora 13 with this motherboard (but with BIOS v. 2838). I’ve found it necessary to blacklist pata_marvell. Apparently this can be done from the boot command line, e.g.:
    linux rescue rd.balcklist=pata.marvell ahci.marvell_enable=1
    Do you not have trouble with this driver in Fedora 16?

    • Tim Jackson says:

      No, never had a problem with pata_marvell, either with Fedora 16 or any earlier Fedora versions. Hope that the newer BIOS does not introduce a new problem!

      • Brian says:

        I finally got around to upgrading to Fedora 16 and did in fact need the blacklist line to see the disks attached to the Marvell controller.

        I also encountered the GPT issue and found your page again while searching for the solution. Thanks for posting this!

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