Hello Thomas, a few weeks ago I was bitten by the problem of the first partition (from fai-cd) being "inactive" by default. Sadly it has been during a presentation of modified Debian systems being installed by FAI 5.3.6 (in an unknown environment).
Two computers didn't boot at all, 8 Laptops showed a warning "no bootable media" or "no bootable partition" (but luckily booted after a keystroke) and only one computer did it without complaining. With my ~100 computers at "home" everything worked fine so I didn't expect such problems and didn't bring a laptop with me ... Now I found a hint in the man-page from new fai-cd (5.8.4) to make the first partition on FAI-bootstick bootable: # parted /dev/sdb set 1 boot on The problem also has been described a year ago: https://lists.uni-koeln.de/pipermail/linux-fai/2017-December/011874.htm l So: At last I had been lucky during my presentation, I found the solution and made all my FAI-pendrives "bootable" now. My points are: a) Is it possible (for others having a better FAI-expirience) to document the workaround here: http://fai-project.org/fai-guide/ and there: https://fai-project.org/doc/man/fai-cd.html b) Since I want to provide my modification to others: Is it possible to change the boot-flag in the ISO-image before dd-ing it to a pendrive? Next time I will try something like: # parted /path/to/fai.iso set 1 boot on before writing the image. c) The new man-page let me think the issue still is present in version 5.8.4. Wouldn't it be possible to change fai-cd to make the first partition bootable by default? I can not imagine that this could have side effects on more modern computers. Thank you for your hard work, Christian
