On Thu, 4 Apr 2019 11:09:13 -0400 Gene Heskett <ghesk...@shentel.net> wrote:
>On Thursday 04 April 2019 10:55:23 Greg Wooledge wrote: > >> On Thu, Apr 04, 2019 at 10:39:19AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: >> > I am today, going to make my 6th attempt to make the stretch >> > netinstall work. >> > >> > I think I have sussed the failure mode, which seems to be that by >> > the time its finslly gets around to installing grub, its too far >> > into the diksk for the dumb bios on this old Asus mobo to find it, >> > so this time I am going to add a /boot as first partition. At 2 or 3 >> > hundred megs. I wonder if that long delay is while it is fscking the hard drive? It can take quite a while with a drive that big. >> >> Are you trying to install the boot loader portion of grub to a >> PARTITION? Instead of to the front of a DISK? >> >> The boot loader part of GRUB goes in the first bytes of the disk. >> That's where the BIOS reads it from, and then executes it. >> >> That boot loader portion then looks for its configuration file in your >> Debian /boot partition, which can be anywhere on the disk. >> >> Or at least, that's how things work in legacy BIOS. (U)EFI is a >> different story. Since you claim this is an "old" machine and even >> used the word "bios", I assume you're using legacy BIOS and MBR (not >> GPT) disklabels. > >Yes. > >> When you partition a disk with an MBR disklabel, you leave a small gap >> at the front of the disk for the boot loader and partition table. >> They go into that unpartitioned space. >> >> The Debian installer already handles all of this for you, even in >> manual partitioning mode (which is what I always use). I can't even >> guess how you've failed this process 5 times, unless it's because you >> keep putting GRUB in the wrong place. > >In the mbr, like it wants to. On the reboot if it ever touches the disk, >the led blink is too fast to see, all I see on screen after post is a >blinking cursor at the upper left corner. I'd give it a while to e2fsck >the drive, but theres zero drive activity. > >Cheers, Gene Heskett -- Charlie Kravetz Linux Registered User Number 425914 [http://linuxcounter.net/user/425914.html] Never let anyone steal your DREAM. [http://keepingdreams.com]
