Re: Again: 'error: no such disk'

[Jordan Uggla]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Neal Murphy <address@hidden> wrote:

> But for the life of me, I *cannot* get grub2 to install on the hard drive. No
> matter what I try (grub-install, do it manually, use separate /boot partition,
> include /boot in the linux root FS), grub always yields "error: no such disk",
> and 'ls' after that always yields "" (blank, nothing). Grub2 simply refuses to
> install properly to the hard drive.
>
> I can usually boot the ISO/flash, go to the grub command line, mutter the
> relevant incantations, and boot the hard disk. I was even able, once, to tell
> grub to use the grub.cfg on the hard drive and boot using the target's menu.
>
> It's close. I just cannot get grub to install properly to the hard drive. What
> am I doing wrong? How can I debug it, trace what's really happening, what's
> not right? What do I need to provide that you can look over and say, 'Here,
> doofus, yer doin' *this* when you should be doin' *that*."? What do I need to
> verify?

What is the exact grub-install command you are running? Do you see any
error messages from grub-install?

>
> Relevant bits of info:
>  - grub version 1.99, no patches
>  - linux 2.6.35.14
>  - single hard drive (other than the usb flash during install)
>  - GPT partitioning
>  - all partitions are aligned to 1 MiB boundaries
>  - 200MiB /boot starts at 1MiB; swap, /var/log and / partitions follow
>  - hand-built, static grub.cfg files (for both install and target)
>  - the same build of grub2 is used for the installer and the target
>
> Ow. A random neuron just fired. Grub isn't assuming that the first partition
> starts at a fixed location on the drive, is it?

No. Grub does not assume that the first partition starts anywhere but
where the partition table says it does. It does assume that the BIOS
Boot Partition [1] is in the same location at boot as it was when
grub-install was run, because there's no reliable way to avoid making
such an assumption.

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#BIOS-installation

-- 
Jordan Uggla (Jordan_U on irc.freenode.net)