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I have switched SATA controller mode from IDE to AHCI, and my Fedora (the latest release) doesn't boot now. I'm not surprised by this fact alone, but I am surprised with the message I'm getting:

BOOTMGR IS MISSING

Which, I believe, is BIOS message, not OS message, so Fedora doesn't even start booting (unlike Windows). Why am I'm getting this message, and is there any way to enable AHCI without reinstalling Fedora from scratch?

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  • What do you want to do, and why? "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" is sage advise...
    – vonbrand
    Mar 1, 2013 at 17:57
  • @vonbrand: I want NCQ.
    – Violet Giraffe
    Mar 1, 2013 at 17:59
  • What happens if you switch back to IDE?
    – harrymc
    Mar 6, 2013 at 19:11
  • @harrymc: it boots fine in IDE mode.
    – Violet Giraffe
    Mar 6, 2013 at 20:57

2 Answers 2

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+50

Info taken from here.

You need to recompile the kernel, if you compile with built-in support then you're safe, but mkinitrd will only take the modules that are needed to boot the running kernel - meaning that unless you can boot the machine into Fedora with AHCI on and then run mkinitrd, it won't take it by default.

You can use the --preload option to manually specific modules though, so you could always try turning AHCI off, booting Fedora, making your custom image:

mkinitrd --allow-missing --preload=ahci --force-scsi-probe /boot/initrd-`uname -r`-custom `uname -r`

Then reboot, enable AHCI and during the GRUB bootup menu edit the "initrd" line to load the custom image you just created. When that's done, reinstall the latest kernel (or yum update one) to create a good initrd.

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  • Are you saying Fedora doesn't support AHCI out of the box? Hell...
    – Violet Giraffe
    Mar 12, 2013 at 9:33
  • @VioletGiraffe : I think it does, it would include AHCI in initrd as long as it detects you're using it... So follow Haydn's advice, it's the right one (same as the accepted answer here)
    – don_crissti
    Mar 12, 2013 at 10:47
  • Is it normal that with AHCI Fedora doesn't boot at all, though? GRUB isn't even executed.
    – Violet Giraffe
    Mar 12, 2013 at 11:21
  • @VioletGiraffe from the thread above it reads it does support it, but only if compiled with, which you can't do as yours doesn't boot when using AHCI. Kindof a catch 22, but the steps above force it to compile with support, so after enabling and switching it'll boot.
    – HaydnWVN
    Mar 12, 2013 at 16:51
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My first piece of advice is to switch back to a bootable state (ie, IDE or Compatibility mode in the BIOS) and check your kernel for AHCI support; if it is, as I suspect, turned off in the kernel Fedora won't know how to boot and will thus fail.

Once you have a kernel that supports AHCI you should be able to re-enable the BIOS setting and boot your machine from AHCI.

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