Re: Grub2 on USB-Stick fails install

[Jordan Uggla]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 10:18 AM, Oliver Friedrich <address@hidden> wrote:
> address@hidden:~$ sudo LANG=C parted -l
> Model: Generic STORAGE DEVICE (scsi)
> Disk /dev/sdb: 32.1GB
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
> Partition Table: msdos
>
> Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
>  1      1049kB  32.1GB  32.1GB  primary  fat32
>

>From that, it doesn't look like you have multiple partition tables,
but you may have stale fat signatures (from previously putting a fat32
filesystem on the whole device, without any partition table) which
grub-install is seeing. When grub-install sees what looks like both a
partition table and a filesystem it can't be sure that it's safe to
embed grub. There is probably a subtler and less destructive way to
remove just the fat signatures, but if you don't mind losing the data
currently on the drive then running "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
count=1" will zero the first MiB of the drive, *destroying the current
partition table and making all files on the drive currently
inaccessible*. After zeroing the first MiB of the drive you should be
able to partition it again and install grub without any problem.

-- 
Jordan Uggla (Jordan_U on irc.freenode.net)