On 8/9/19 2:16 PM, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> OK. Towards my usual ugrade, I'm told:
>
> grub-install: warning: this GPT partition label contains no BIOS Boot Partition; embedding won't be possible.
> grub-install: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required for RAID and LVM install.

> At this point, it has failed to write to /dev/sdb twice, presumably because I have only one hard drive. When it fails the second time and tries again I tell it to insatall to dev/sda which does exist. It now complains about my GPT partition label. I don't have a GPT partition label. My machine is a bios machine. See:

I've seen this error when the second disk is gpt, even though I'm
installing to the first disk. I've also seen it when the disk was
previously partitioned as gpt and then switched to dos partition table.
Does yours fall into the second category?


>
> What gives?
>
> At this poiit I'm afraid to turn my machine off, lest it never start again.
>
If you have a grub boot CD or USB, you can boot from grub command line.

> The machine is a Purism laptop, running Devuan beowulf. Oddly, when
> aptitude was updating, it kept mentioning ascii instead. But my
> /etc/apt/sources.lst is as follows:

You did run 'apt update' or the equivalent after editing sources.list,
didn't you? (I'm hoping you forgot to do that, because then it's an easy fix.)
The other easy fix is to remove any mentions of ascii in any files in
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/

That's all I have for ideas right now.

fsmithred