On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 7:18 PM, Sachin Gupta sachin3072004@gmail.com wrote:

Hello Everyone,

I am a newbie. When I try to install GRUB2 on centos 5.2 system, I get following error.

CentOS 5 and 6 don't support GRUB 2, only GRUB legacy is supported. There's a decent chance you could grab a Fedora RPM and it will install OK but I don't know what version to recommend because CentOS 5 is so much older than even the oldest Fedora that first had GRUB 2.

It's a bit tedious to build GRUB 2 yourself from upstream, but that's also an option. I only recommend that for computers with BIOS firmware. There are some significant differences with the UEFI build of GRUB 2 between upstream and RH/Fedora that might make you want to drink heavily.

Not that upstream, the commands are grub-install and grub-mkconfig, whereas for RH/Fedora it's grub2-install and grub2-mkconfig to avoid confusion with the legacy versions that RH still supports.

centos5: grub-install /dev/sda //sbin/grub-setup: warn: This GPT partition label has no BIOS Boot Partition; embedding won't be possible!. //sbin/grub-setup: warn: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged.. //sbin/grub-setup: error: will not proceed with blocklists.

Can you please help me figure out the problem ?

Well I can't tell if this grub-install is actually GRUB 2 upstream, which I suspect it might be because I'm not aware that legacy supports GPT (?) But since GRUB legacy is from the pleistocene I may have just forgotten. Anyway, the simplest solution is carve out 1MiB of free space somehow, and make a 1MiB partition. I suggest using GPT fdisk, a.k.a. gdisk. Set the partition type to EF02, which will set the partition type GUID to that of BIOS Boot. And now GRUB should install - it will automatically find that partition.

If you use parted, the flag to use is biosboot, which does the same thing as EF02 in gdisk.