Hi All, A slightly off-topic question arising from a different distro, which may replicate itself on Gentoo.
I installed Mint-Linux, in a VM. The host PC MoBo has a legacy BIOS system. I used a GPT scheme to create partitions on the virtual disk. The first 1M on the virtual disk was left empty by gdisk. I thought GRUB can use this for its core image. Note, I did not create a partition in this 1MB empty space at the start of the disk. While running the Mint Installer I got a warning from its partition manager telling me I had not specified a BIOS_grub partition and the installation may fail. I ignored the warning and continued with the installation, which completed successfully. A few weeks later I ran an update which among other packages updated grub2- common. An ncurses menu popped up warning me: "The GRUB boot loaders was previously installed to a disk that is no longer present, or whose unique identifier has changed for some reason". It offered to install in /dev/vda, /dev/vda1, or /dev/vda2. I selected /dev/ vda which represents the virtual disk. It failed to install in /dev/vda because the device did not contain a BIOS_grub partition. I tried 'grub-install --force' and --boot-directory options, but in all cases it failed to install. At the end I had to create a new 1M partition with gdisk and set its type to ef02 (BIOS boot partition), before grub would install its core image successfully. QUESTIONS: Why/how the initial installation succeeded without an ef02 partition, but a grub package update would not proceed without it? Where did the Mint installer store the grub core image to be able to continue with the installation? -- Regards, Mick
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
