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I have new computer with UEFI. I formated the disc as GPT (not MBR), made few small partions on start (as placeholders for UEFI, for boot, for swap etc ...) then larger partition for system / (and left rest of the disc free for future usage) and installed Gentoo.

But I cannot figure, how to install grub-LEGACY to enable booting different kernels with different command line aguments. It is easy on MBR disc and it is easy to manage grub.gonf with just nano or so to get changes done. Much easier and more straithforward, then configuring and running bunch of scripts every time I need small change to Grub2 configuration (and the resultinggrub.conf is also much smaller and more readable), so I would like to stich with grub-legacy as long as possible.

(I know, that Grub2 is more new and supports more filesystems, which I do not ever use, but so far grub-legacy worked just well for me and did everything I needed in easy and simply to understand/modify way)

Thanks for all directions

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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3 possibilities

mbr

Use mbr; waste the disk space over 2 TB

gpt

Use grub2 with gpt.

[Stressing yourself over the scripts etc is not strictly necessary — you can just ignore the suggestion not to edit grub.conf and edit like legacy grub. Just make sure no updates that point to (this) grub automatically run]

hybrid

Use an hybrid approach

ie 4 mbr partitions (under 2TB) which grub legacy is aware of and a gpt aware OS that uses the rest.

Caveat: I've given the third choice since that's what you (seem to) want. However as the link suggests its a great deal of trouble and not worth it.

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  • @gilhad Thanks for accepting! Which option did you take?
    – Rusi
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 4:57
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Grub Legacy wants to use the gap between the MBR and the first partition for storing its own code. This space is not available when using GPT, because the GPT table is much larger and there is typically no gap between the table and the first partition. Grub2 can use a special BIOS Boot partition for storing the code instead of the gap.

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If you want to boot in BIOS mode (alias CSM alias legacy mode), and you have a GUID partition table (GPT), you need a small partition with the bios_grub flag. This is where grub will install the data, that is installed in the first mibibyte (after the first 512 bytes but before the partitions) in a drive with the old MSDOS partition table.

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