James Harper <james.harper@bendigoit.com.au> wrote:
Being a 3TB disk I had to make it a GUID Partition Table, and aside from a clean install I did once where Debian installer just did everything for me, I've never used gpt before. I believe I'm supposed to make a partition called the BIOS boot partition... can I store data on here or is it separate to my existing /boot partition? I created such a partition and did grub-install /dev/sda but then on boot from that disk all I get is "GRUB _" (where _ is the flashing cursor).
I haven't installed to a machine running UEFI myself, but if that's what it's using then you'll need to install the correct version of grub, e.g., grub-efi-amd64 rather than grub-pc. There is, as you note, a FAT32 partition involved; I assume you can place the kernel there in addition to all of the Grub files, or presumably the kernel can reside in a separate /boot partition. Grub itself, as I understand it, has to be loaded from the FAT32 partition and executed by EFI. If your machine is booting from legacy BIOS mode rather than EFI then you shouldn't need the FAT32 partition and you should be able to boot grub-pc rather than grub-efi. As mentioned, this is all based on what I've read in a couple of places. I don't have an EFI machine with which to work. It would be convenient if you could boot EFI and just use the FAT32 partition as /boot to hold both Grub and the kernel image.