[bug #37631] I cannot grub-install my external hard drive

[John Ericson]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?37631>

                 Summary: I cannot grub-install my external hard drive
                 Project: GNU GRUB
            Submitted by: ericson2314
            Submitted on: Thu 25 Oct 2012 04:36:07 AM GMT
                Category: Disk &amp; Partition
                Severity: Major
                Priority: 5 - Normal
              Item Group: Software Error
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
         Originator Name: 
        Originator Email: 
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
                 Release: 
                 Release: other
         Reproducibility: Every Time
         Planned Release: None

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Details:

I want to make my USB external hard drive bootable (so I can use loopback.cfg
with a bunch of ISOs and not have to burn boot disks anymore). For this to
work I want to store the configuration files for grub on the external hardisk,
and of course install grub2 itself on the hard disk.

The harddisk has an ntfs (/dev/sdb1) and ext4 (/dev/sdb2) partion. /dev/sdb1
is mounted at /mnt. Neither partition contains an OS. I wanted to install the
grub configuration files on my bigger NTFS partion, so I ran "sudo
grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/boot/ /dev/sdb" and got the error "Path
`/mnt/boot/grub' is not readable by GRUB on boot. Installation is impossible.
Aborting."

I then ran grub-install with --debug and figured out the error was the return
of a call to grub-probe. running "grub-probe -t fs /mnt/boot/" (the line that
returned the error in grub-install) I got "grub-probe: error: cannot find a
GRUB drive for /dev/sdb1.  Check your device.map."

I spent a good bit of time on #grub at freenode trying to figure this out.
Everything was mounted correctly, and nobody else we could think of testing
turned up any leads. Jordan_U (evidentally he is well known) told me to make a
bug report so here I am doing that now.

This was all with GRUB version "2.00-7ubuntu1", the default version of grub
(as of writting) on Ubuntu 12.10, which I recently upgraded to.




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