Arch Linux

jb

Member

From: Florida

Registered: 2006-06-22

Posts: 466

Grub (1 and 2) fails to install with /boot on a bios-based gpt disk

Alright, here's my setup:

/dev/sda: a few TiB drives on an LSI 9650se (hardware raid) in raid 5.
1: 2500GB storage area (jfs)
2: 100MB boot (ext2)
3: 350GB root (jfs)
4: 150GB (Unallocated)

/dev/sdb: just a 250GB sata drive.
1: 100MB Win 7 boot
2: 250GB Win 7

Since my sda is violating the 2TiB bios limitation, I switched it to a GPT label.  Originally, I was going to have 7 on sda as well, but it seems that microsoft doesn't have any OS that can install to this sort of setup.  And being that it's nothing more than a steam client partition, I don't mind it being off the array.

So far during the installation, I've tried reversing the drive order so grub 1 could be installed on an mbr disk, but it still can't read the array.  The output on tty7 was:
root(hd1,1)
Error 22: No such partition

This leads me to believe that the gpt patch doesn't work for this setup, so I moved on to trying grub2.  To do this, I bound dev, sys, and proc, copied mtab over, and chrooted in to the system.  From there I uninstalled grub, and installed grub2.

After adjusting my grub.cfg entry to (keep in mind, I've switched sda and sdb):

set timeout=5
set default=0

# (0) Arch Linux
menuentry "Arch Linux" {
set root=(hd1,2)
linux /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sdb2 ro
initrd /kernel26.img
}

Running grub-install /dev/sda (or sdb) results in:

grub: error: Cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sdb2.  Check your device.map.

Auto-detection of a filesystem module failed.
Please specify the module with the option '--modules' explicitly.

I checked devices.map, but it looks fine.  So I move on to calling explicit modules.  The output is the same for both sda and sdb:

# grub-install /dev/sda --modules="ext2"
grub: error: Cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sdb2.  Check your device.map.

grub: error: Cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sdb2.  Check your device.map.

grub: error: Cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sdb2.  Check your device.map.

grub: error: Cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sdb2.  Check your device.map.

You attempted a cross-disk install, but the filesystem containing /boot/grub does not support UUIDs.

I'm not sure what the last line means considering I have a populated /dev/disk/by-uuid/ directory. But what's really throwing me off here is that I was able to accomplish this a few months ago.  I reinstalled for the sake of rearranging the partitions.  I think my next action is to grab an older beta of grub2 that would have been around when it worked.

In the mean time, any thoughts?

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