On Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 02:41:11PM -0400, fsmithred via Dng wrote:
> 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.

The problem I reported was even stupider than that. I wsa accidentally
upgrading the wrong machine. It actually *is* an ascii machine. But it
is still a problem that it wont finish the routine upgrade. I've made
another post describing the real situation -- that it is in an infinite
retry loop trying to write to sector 51 of /dev/hdb, which, by the was,
*is* a BIOS drive.

I'd love to figure out how to boot from a gpt disk. There are two of
them on my BIOS machine. Those disks were too big to be BIOS.

And I'd love to get it to stop retrying writing on sector 51. I
suspect that disk is somewhat borked and needs to be replaced. But I'm
hesitant to shut it off when it's having trouble installing or
updating grub and may be unbootable.

-- hendrik

>
> fsmithred
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