Hello Peter,
On 29/04/2023 at 16:02, Peter Ehlert wrote:
Legacy aka BIOS booting
system has 4 physical disk drives, all GPT partition tables
only one drive has a partition with bios_grub
install was on a drive without bios_grub
when install was finished, a list of drives was displayed, asking where
to install GRUB.
the install drive was highlighted
I selected the drive with bios_grub
the display showed "installing GRUB on (...drive it was installed on...)
According to /var/log/syslog, GRUB was successfully installed on
/dev/sdb although this drive has no BIOS boot partition:
Apr 28 23:55:51 grub-installer: info: Installing grub on '/dev/sdb'
Apr 28 23:55:51 grub-installer: info: grub-install does not support
--no-floppy
Apr 28 23:55:51 grub-installer: info: Running chroot /target
grub-install --force "/dev/sdb"
Apr 28 23:55:51 grub-installer: Installing for i386-pc platform.
Apr 28 23:56:01 grub-installer: grub-install: warning: this GPT
partition label contains no BIOS Boot Partition; embedding won't be
possible.
Apr 28 23:56:01 grub-installer: grub-install: warning: Embedding is not
possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using
blocklists. However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is
discouraged..
Apr 28 23:56:01 grub-installer: Installation finished. No error reported.
Apr 28 23:56:01 grub-installer: info: grub-install ran successfully
(several other OS's are on that drive if that matters)
reboot gave me the Old GRUB menu, not including my new system.
What do you mean by "old GRUB menu" ? The GRUB which was previously
installed on /dev/sdb ? That does not seem possible according to the
above logs. Are you sure that the machine rebooted from this disk ?
(note that /dev/sd* naming is not stable across reboots and does not
match BIOS disk numbering/naming)
boot from another OS:
# grub-install /dev/sde && update-grub
now my GRUB menu includes the new system
In chroot or directly from the other OS ?
Running grub-install directly from another OS just installed that other
OS's GRUB on /dev/sde and running update-grub directly just added the
new Debian installation to that other OS's boot menu if os-prober is
enabled.