No booting on Gateway Lt2030u

Help
1

Hi all

I just got a reconditioned Gateway Lt2030u, 10.1 netbook. It boots from the Haiku usb just fine and even seems to install just fine but upon reboot the computer says it can find a bootable drive. This laptop works with Linux and even OpenBSD. I am using the latest nightly, any suggestions?

2

Hi there.

It looks like you ran into a very similar issue I had a few weeks ago. If you want to try Haiku as the only OS on that PC, make sure you delete all the partitions and tell the installer to use the whole (raw) disk. That actually works with Haiku, without even creating a partition/slice like we’re use to with other operating systems.

3

That didn’t work, it still can’t find a bootable device.

4

I had to install BootMan and it worked.

3 Likes
5

Having a partition table is a sane thing to do.
However:

  • It is a good idea to recreate the partition table and the boot sector, just in case. We don’t know what your machine has installed there (maybe a dummy bootloader that just says “no operating system installed”)
  • If you do this using DriveSetup (delete and re-create a partition table), it will install our own boot record, which will just look for an active partition and start it. So make sure to make the system partition active.

Of course, there is always the option of installing Bootman, which can be used to boot a partition even if it is not marked as active.

Fortunately this mess with boot sectors and active partitions will go away with EFI, which I think can provide a more sensible and more understood way to boot the system. But we still have some work to do to get there.

6

I did try that several times and it didn’t work, this is the only machine where I had to do this, I don’t know why.