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nixer

Member

From: North Carolina, USA

Registered: 2016-11-30

Posts: 224  

MBR and efi booting issue

I was recently gifted a HP 15 dy-1023 laptop computer with 4-cores and 12gb ram and and I am not having any success with a working grub install.  Any idea or help is appreciated. 

I have updated the laptop BIOS to the latest version and the BIOS settings shows that Legacy Mode is "enabled" which disables the "secure boot" option.  The Legacy Boot options are listed in the BIOS. But the BIOS also says that the UEFI options will be a higher precedent.  After making these changes, the MBR USB flash drive was recognized and the live drive booted.  I immediately wiped the old proprietary system, created a new legacy msdos MBR on the drive and created the /root and /swap partitions.  The live install completed normally.  I used refracta-tools to build the snapshot and installed from a daedalus legacy mbr install (no gpt drive or UEFI, thus a regular grub install).   

The only way that I can get this install to boot is to use supergrub boot disk. 

My troubleshooting is mostly trial and error, after researching the need for EFI installs using extra partitions like a 1mb unformatted partition if using a gpt drive on a legacy system, a /efi (fat32) partition, and a /boot (ext2) partition.  I have tried the install using both options together and individually using legacy grub and grub-efi-amd64 but I still get the same HP error upon booting.  The error is this:

Boot Device Not Found
Please Install an Operating System
Hard Disk - (3FO)

I think this is a hardware and/or grub install issue since it will boot using supergrub.

Final note... everything that deals with U(EFI) in the BIOS is supposedly disabled, and the hard drive has a msdos master boot record.  But the install does have  /sys/firmware/efi folder and it is populated with some files and folders , which leads me to believe that it is actually trying to use efi.  Is this correct?  If so, this may be part of the problem.  I read some posts on a different linux forum board about HP laptops not actually having true legacy bios functions but a simulated ability, which makes me confused.  Just mentioning this as a possible consideration.

I like legacy technology and I have fought this GPT and UEFI thing as long as I can.  My question is, what do I need to do to successfully get this thing to boot into Devuan?  If I have to start over and reinstall, no problem.

rbit

Member

Registered: 2018-06-12

Posts: 52  

Re: MBR and efi booting issue

first thing that comes to mind is, ensure the boot partition has the "boot" flag - if /boot is not a separate partition, then make sure the root partition has the boot flag

Camtaf

Member

Registered: 2019-11-19

Posts: 463  

Re: MBR and efi booting issue

Try using grub install from the live disk...

I found that I needed to be connected to the internet for grub to install properly....

Last edited by Camtaf (Today 09:37:04)

nixer

Member

From: North Carolina, USA

Registered: 2016-11-30

Posts: 224  

Re: MBR and efi booting issue

Thank you both for your suggestions.

first thing that comes to mind is, ensure the boot partition has the "boot" flag

The /boot partition 1gb, is formatted ext2, and the boot flag is active.

Try using grub install from the live disk

I did this as one of my efforts to work around this issue, but not from the live disk.  I ran "grub-install /dev/nvme0n1" while booted with the aid of supergrub.  This command installed grub to the beginning of the drive.  Should I have installed it to the /boot partition instead?  For over 19+ years of using linux, I have always installed grub to the drive and not a partition.  Does efi change this behavior?