[SOLVED] GRUB beeps 3x on boot

[o5gmmob8]

I am booting a system that is 14 years old today and it does not have the option for UEFI booting.

I did:

0. mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 && mount /dev/sdb1 /boot
1. grub-install /dev/sdb
2. grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
3. attempted to boot system with newly created GRUB cfg, system beeped 3x and screen appeared stuck on Dell BIOS boot screen.

4. rebooted back into admin USB thumbdrive, backed up grub.cfg to grub.cfg.0 and simplified grub.cfg to essentially
menuentry {
root=hd1,1
linux=
init=
}

5. rebooted, same thing as earlier.

I have a GPT partitioned disk where I originally was planning to do UEFI, but soon realized that my hardware doesn't support that, so I took the ESP partition and repurposed it as a BIOS boot partition formatting it with ext4. My root FS is ZFS on LUKS, so I am passing root=zfs on the kernel cmdline along with rd.luks.uuid=.

I can see that GRUB is getting invoked, so I think grub-install did work, but I suspect my grub.cfg may be an issue.

[NeddySeagoon]

o5gmmob8,

The BIOS Boot partition is not yours. Grub will use it to store the stage1.5 as with GPT in use, these is no space before the first partition to save the stage1.5.
The history and what work and what may not is on the Wiki

Depending on the size of your your HDD, you may not need a boot partition. Instead, /boot on the root filesystem may work.

Its possible to change a GPT partition table with no more than four entries to an MSDOS portition table without losing and data.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[o5gmmob8]

Oh, good point, I forgot that GPT itself is newer. I suppose just 5 years ago, I decided to move to UEFI, but prior to that, everything I booted was BIOS and I also formatted it using the MBR scheme. Let me figure that bit out.

I received this machine 2nd hand recently and forgot about all of that legacy stuff.

No, my root partition is encrypted and inside ZFS. So, I need a /boot partition, I should be able to figure that part out, I will update shortly.

[o5gmmob8]

Success!

I had to use the generated grub.cfg, my abbreviated one didn't work. I miss the old days of just specifying the kernel and init.