[arch-general] Single Drive Fresh Install (mbr/grub2) Fails to boot (can boot existing from .iso??)

[David C. Rankin]

On 10/30/2016 1:34 AM, David C. Rankin wrote:
>   So I guess that leaves me with Ralfs solution of find the "Clear the CMOS"
> jumper, clear the bios, replace the battery (I hope it is a standard 2032 or its
> a trip to the battery store...)

I think I have it figured out by process of elimination. I took another
drive and formatted it GPT and created a 1M bios_boot partition as shown
on the arch grub wiki. After grub install and reboot, exact same issue
"hard disk error 0F3" no operating system found. So with 2 new drives in
the laptop, neither would boot.

sda as the GPT/bios_boot configured drive, and sdb as the MBR configured
drive, no boot, but booting the install .iso from USB and "Boot Existing
OS" worked fine on both (with changes to either 'hd1 0' and 'hd2 0',
respectively.

So with further reading, it looks like this bios/laptop will actually
require a full UEFI partition scheme that the bios converts/boots in
Legacy mode via a bios_boot partition on the drive. That is a screwy way
of doing things, but makes sense given that the .iso has a full EFI
setup and boots with no problem whatsoever.

Question, for those familiar with UEFI schemes, since the .iso boots
fine, is there anything else I need to do other than following the Arch
grub wiki to construct the UEFI partition scheme and create the 1M
bios_boot partition? The wiki says the bios_boot partition can be
anywhere (partition number wise) as long as it lives in the first 2T of
space. Any other thoughts or tweaks to the UEFI setup I ought to try for
the next test?


-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.