Some problem with the grub-installer - failed to install the bootloeader

[ghost]

Hello Lucas and Hisham and everyone else,

I just tried (Today, Saturday, 11th March 2017) to install the gobolinux alpha1 release.

The installation worked fine except for one problem during the grub-installer.

I can not remember the exact issue but the grub-installer said something about
the file size being too large (core.img) or embedded installation.

This is altogether quite confusing since ... I have no idea what the grub installer
meant with an embedded installation. :)

I also don't know if there was any option that could be picked by me during
the installation anyway either.

The error message is similar like this one here:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97483

/sbin/grub-setup: warn: Your embedding area is unusually small. core.img won't fit in it..
/sbin/grub-setup: warn: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and its use is discouraged..
/sbin/grub-setup: error: if you really want blocklists, use --force.

(It may also be that I selected something incorrectly during the installer, I don't remember.)

Anyway, afterwards came the "GoboLinux should now be installed, have fun" or
something like that. So I rebooted.

Upon reboot, I saw the old slackware lilo menu and of course booting from
it does not work because the gobolinux installer wiped away the old content
on that hdd - which was perfectly fine, since I choose that during the
installation. (I have plenty of backups too, before I start an installation,
these days.)

I do not know what the issue really was about but I think I may have at the
least some guess.

I had slackware in 32 bit on that machine just before I would go to install
gobolinux, and slackware uses lilo.

Since lilo would still persist even after the goblinux installer, I assume
that grub did not wipe the lilo away. Or perhaps was confused about
it.

Unfortunately I also can not really say how to fix this, since I do not
know grub very well. What I can say is that I then tried pclinuxos
installer and it worked fine (I selected grub2), so I assume that this
issue about the lilo bootloader confusing installers can be somehow
fixed.

Anyway, sorry that I can not give more help about this problem right
now, perhaps I was the only one with this problem; the pclinuxos
installer has one interesting option in that you can select which
bootloader to use, e. g. grub, grub2, lilo and a fourth one which
I forgot.

I hope this is of some help in one way or the other, perhaps there
is some grub-specific entry or assumption during the installer
that could be read/checked again - the rest of the installation
up to that point worked very fine without an error. Oddly enough,
I also remember that the least release of gobolinux worked fine
with grub too (but I think I may not have had a slackware
installation prior to that but some grub-based distribution, so
perhaps it really has something to do with lilo being stubborn
and persistent - aside from slackware I do not even know any
other distribution that still uses lilo, but one good thing about
slackware is that it does not get into the way normally).

[lucasvr]

Hello there.

The description of the error message suggests that you have a disk arranged with a GPT layout on a machine running a regular BIOS (non-UEFI). Could you confirm if that's the case by attaching the output of "fdisk -l" and of "efibootmgr -v"?

Thanks!

[lucasvr]

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