Asking for help and guidance with reinstalling GRUB and fixing the boot partition/ Legacy BIOS/GPT

@BreakingBad you are breaking it badly :laughing: .
Here is your real problem:

You were almost there, almost remembered, but not completely:

This flag should have been on sda5 (unknown=unformatted?). It’s this:

When you need to install grub in MSDOS_Legacy mode, on a gpt drive, you fake the MBR target, creating a small partition and do not format it at all, only applying the bios_grub flag. Then you install grub, with an MSDOS/Legacy grub-install command, targeting the sda drive (like normal), not the partition (sda5). Grub would find it by the flag.

From your long adventure’s story telling, it seems:

  • The only UEFI type booting is done with your Hackintosh
  • All other systems (Debian, WinOS, EnOS) are on MSDOS_Legacy
  • Grub customizer is still a destroyer application (for adventurous users, since many users use it in a simple way).

Actually, when you remove the package, the /etc/grub.d/* drop-ins are not removed/deleted. This created the extra mess.

You missed this description from your story:

It might have helped someone to identify the issue (from the errors/messages).

As for your questions:

Yes. No UEFI. No systemd-boot. No rEFInd.

Yes, but fake, as explained above.

Yes. No.
It was (probably) installed on sda5, as explained above.

Possible solution:

  • Boot with EnOS Live installer image in MSDOS_Legacy mode
  • Use Gparted to apply bios_grub flag on sda5 (the small unformatted partition)
  • Chroot to EnOS installed system, mounting only the root partition (sda4)
  • Remove/uninstall grub-customizer
  • Delete/rename /etc/grub.d folder
  • Re-install grub package
  • Install grub for legacy, on sda (no need for sudo in chroot)
grub-install --recheck --target=i386-pc /dev/sda
  • Create grub config.

Good luck! :wink:


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