[SOLVED] Boot failure on HP notebook with recent ISOs

[martinw]

Having successfully installed Mageia 2 beta 2 on two other machines, I thought I would give it a try on my HP notebook. I was surprised to find that just having the DVD in the drive is enough to stop the laptop booting - it gets stuck in an infinite loop accessing the DVD before even reaching the stage of letting you enter the BIOS setup, which can only be interrupted by power off. Even more strange is that the same behaviour occurs with the same ISO on a USB stick.

Further investigation shows that this behaviour dates back to alpha 3 - alpha 2 and Mageia 1 ISOs boot normally.

Filed as https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5036

[martinw]

The root cause has been identified. The ISOs have been created with the first partition starting at sector 0. My HP notebook obviously can't handle this. The fix is described in the bug report.

This also turns out to be the reason why I couldn't create a USB stick that would boot in my other machines. Remastering the ISOs to start at sector 1 fixes that problem too.