Monday, August 3, 2015

Fedora install issue - The system may not be bootable.

If you see this error message when installing Fedora (was version 22 in my case):

There was an error installing the bootloader. The system may not be bootable.

Remind yourself  that the system may be bootable!

The first 5 times I elected to stop the install (why continue if the system wont boot?). But the sixth time around after doing everything I could to verify it should be working I elected to go ahead with the install even though "The system may not be bootable.".

Guess what happened?

It didn't boot.

But the only reason it didn't boot was because the system was set to boot in BIOS mode and not in UEFI mode that I used when booting the install stick. Apparently the installer was unable to change the system's default boot selection. I went into the system setup and changed the default boot device to UEFI mode and the proper drive, booted again, and it all worked perfectly.

Possibly if the default boot setup had previously been set as such I may have never seen that message.