Cloning mishaps

**oldfred** · June 27th, 2019

Your sda is MBR and has grub for BIOS boot.
Your sdb is gpt and has an ESP for UEFI boot. But in UEFI mode grub always wants an ESP on sda.
Your sdc is MBR but also has an ESP, which can work but not recommended as gpt is standard with UEFI.

If you have newer UEFI hardware, better to use UEFI with gpt.
But if you really want BIOS you can still use gpt but then need a bios_grub partition for grub to correctly install to gpt's protective MBR.

But whichever you want better to have all as BIOS boot or all as UEFI/gpt boot.
Since installs are on separate drives, you can dual boot, but not from grub, only directly from UEFI boot menu.
Once you start booting in one mode, you cannot switch. Or grub then can only boot other installs in same boot mode, which you started with.

**donbcilly** · June 27th, 2019

Well, so what would you advise I do?
I can easily convert MBR to gpt on all disks - if that would help.
I can re-create the EFI/ESP partition on sda... and/or delete the one on SDC.

I thought it would be a good idea to have at least two for redundancy - in case of failures.
And I deleted the one on sda because... well, I couldn't install grub so it would boot "properly" from sdb - it mixed up the entries and booted an older kernel... which it still does, obviously.

I really find the whole grub/EFI/BIOS boot thing confusing.
There's just some logic in it that for some reason totally escapes me. What can I try?

[EDIT] sda might be failing. I was running Neon on it, started getting errors, fsck-d them, got me a new disk (sdb, SSD) and cloned it to that.

**donbcilly** · June 28th, 2019

Originally Posted by donbcilly

I really find the whole grub/EFI/BIOS boot thing confusing.

Well, it seems everyone else does too ;·)
Anyway, I changed MBR to gpt on all disks, re-created the EFI/ESP partition on sda, installed grub to sda, and, no change.
It still sets the wrong entry as default and boots an older kernel (two versions older now - in the sense that I have a newer newer one and it ignores that as well).

And sda is definitely failing, gparted gave more errors and I had to fix them.

**donbcilly** · June 28th, 2019

Thing is...
...in my grub.cfg, the "default" menuentry has "set root='hd1,gpt1'", which is correct. It's sdb1.

If I press 'e' at the boot menu on the default one (which boots to sda) it has "set root='hd0,msdos2'.
Now, "msdos" does not appear anywhere in my grub.cfg. I converted all disks to gpt.
Also, my grub.cfg has the neon on sdb1 (correctly) as the default and a separate entry for a neon on sda2.

My grub boot menu has the reverse - with a "non-existent" msdos-type entry.
So, I install and update grub (from sdb, to both sda and sdb) and what gets written is not my actual grub.cfg.

So, you see, it looks likely that even if I do re-install neon, it won't make any difference.
As the alien clone ghost zombie- grub has taken over the world... well, mine anyway, and... oh, I don't know.