How can I use a disk with GPT partition table on a system with a BIOS but no (U)EFI?
I have a system with a 3 TB drive (no other drives and since this is a remote machine I have no choices here) and with a GPT for obvious reasons. Ubuntu 12.04 is being bootstrapped onto the system and this worked so far. Now after bind-mounting /dev, /proc and /sys from the host into the target system and chrooting into it, I installed linux-image-server which worked fine (after linking /sbin/initctl as /bin/true). Because this is a remote machine I have to do all of this via SSH and have no bootable CD or anything. I can boot into a rescue system if it fails, though (PXE).
Now I know that grub2 is supposed to support the scenario, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to install it.
The boot (and root) device is to be /dev/md0, composed of /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 in RAID mode 0. With /dev/md0 mounted under /target I am running:
grub-install --root-directory=/target --no-floppy /dev/sda
which fails with:
/usr/sbin/grub-setup: warn: This GPT partition label has no BIOS Boot Partition; embedding won't be possible!.
/usr/sbin/grub-setup: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required when the root device is on a RAID array or LVM volume.
So how can I get grub2 installed in order to have this BIOS-based system boot properly?
Note: it doesn't matter whether I run this inside or outside the chroot environment. The error and output are identical. Likely because I bind-mounted /dev etc into place. Of course appropriate adjustments to the command line (no --root-directory=) have been made.
You need to create a bios_grub partition on the disk. You can do this with
partedand setting the bios_grub flag on the partition. 1 MiB is sufficient, but it needs to be in the lower 2TiB of the disk.