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I had a bit of bad luck with grub the other day, so I stuffed a new disk in the machine this afternoon and I tried to install Arch again. But this time I used a DOS/MBR configuration rather than a GPT/MBR configuration. I used the default recommendation by fdisk for the beginning point of the single partition on the 1 TiB disk. Once again, I used the btrfs file system. Everything seemed to go smoothly, until it was time to reboot, when I observed the following:
Booting `Arch Linux’
Loading Linux linux-lts …
Loading initial ramdisk …
error: failure reading sector0x75de48 from `hd0’
Press any key to continue…But, of course pressing any key does nothing, because the system is frozen!
So, I was doing some scouting around and ran into this little nugget:
GRUB https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs
Partition offset
The offset problem may happen when you try to embed core.img into a partitioned disk. It means that it is OK to embed GRUB's core.img into a Btrfs pool on a partitionless disk (e.g. /dev/sdX) directly.
GRUB can boot Btrfs partitions, however the module may be larger than other file systems. And the core.img file made by grub-install may not fit in the first 63 sectors (31.5KiB) of the drive between the MBR and the first partition. Up-to-date partitioning tools such as fdisk and gdisk avoid this issue by offsetting the first partition by roughly 1MiB or 2MiB.
I looked at the “Sector Layout” schemes from this Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
I have no frame of reference for where sector 0x75de48 is on the disk, but according to the Wikipedia article it wouldn’t appear to be in the vicinity of the MBR. So, can anyone advise if this “Partition Offset” issue is the likely cause, or is it more likely that I have bad hardware, a corrupted filesystem, or I just suck at installing Arch? Any insight would be welcome.
Thanks in advance!
Last edited by freeze_dried (2023-03-31 14:56:31)
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