Hi there,
For some unexplainable reason Fedora developers had desided for all Fedora users about how they may and how they may not partition theirs hard disks. The only boot manager that Fedora installer supports (that it can install) is grub2. And starting from Fedora 18 grub2 could be installed into an MBR gap only. Neither alternative grub2 installation method (into a Linux partition) nor alternative boot manager (for example FreeBSD's boot0) is supported.
The MBR gap is an unallocated disk space between the MBR sector and first sector of the first primary partition. Fedora developers had assumed that the MBR gap always exists, always has enough space and it isn't used by any other crafty software. In my case there is a first primary NTFS partition without MBR gap and Fedora 19 installer can't install grub2.
There is a bug report about this issue:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=969709
After some discussion with Chris Murphy this bug was closed with a WONTFIX status. And I want to ask why Fedora and its installer is so hard designed? Why it doesn't support any alternative boot manager or boot loaders? Supporting something like boot0 (FreeBSD Boot Manager that resides in the MBR sector only) would be enough. Supporting grub2 on a Linux partition instead of the MBR gap would also be enough. After all the main boot manager fuctionality is choosing a primary partition to boot from.
So should I consider using other Linux distribution because Fedora doesn't boot anyway and nobody cares?
For some unexplainable reason Fedora developers had desided for all Fedora users about how they may and how they may not partition theirs hard disks. The only boot manager that Fedora installer supports (that it can install) is grub2. And starting from Fedora 18 grub2 could be installed into an MBR gap only. Neither alternative grub2 installation method (into a Linux partition) nor alternative boot manager (for example FreeBSD's boot0) is supported.
The MBR gap is an unallocated disk space between the MBR sector and first sector of the first primary partition. Fedora developers had assumed that the MBR gap always exists, always has enough space and it isn't used by any other crafty software. In my case there is a first primary NTFS partition without MBR gap and Fedora 19 installer can't install grub2.
There is a bug report about this issue:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=969709
After some discussion with Chris Murphy this bug was closed with a WONTFIX status. And I want to ask why Fedora and its installer is so hard designed? Why it doesn't support any alternative boot manager or boot loaders? Supporting something like boot0 (FreeBSD Boot Manager that resides in the MBR sector only) would be enough. Supporting grub2 on a Linux partition instead of the MBR gap would also be enough. After all the main boot manager fuctionality is choosing a primary partition to boot from.
So should I consider using other Linux distribution because Fedora doesn't boot anyway and nobody cares?