fai-cd not bootable on some computers

[Christian Meyer]

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