Problem :
I installed Arch Linux on the second partition of my external hard drive and marked the partition as bootable in GParted, however it won’t boot even if I select it from my BIOS’ Boot Menu (it says “Non-system disk or disk error”). Can somebody tell me what am I doing wrong?
Solution :
To boot the Linux kernel, you need a boot loader. There are multiple options, the most popular ones being:
- Grub
- Syslinux
- Lilo
There are some interesting newcomers though, especially for UEFI, especially Gummiboot. The Arch Linux Beginners’ Guide contains a chapter on setting up a boot loader.
Basically, it’s something like this:
pacman -S grub
grub-install /dev/sda
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg