I have a fairly old PC with some existing OS installs on different partitions in /dev/sda. BIOS is the only supported boot method on this machine. sdb and sdc exist but don’t contain anything bootable.
I have a shiny new 120 GB ssd at /dev/sdd which is partitioned as GPT with /dev/sdd1 being a 1 MB bios boot partition with the bios_grub flag set (as required when using GPT), /dev/sdd2 and /dev/sdd3 are 60 GB partitions taking up the remainder of the drive. The intention was to have my new MATE 16.04 install on /dev/sdd2 and keep /dev/sdd3 spare for future use.
I installed 16.04 LTS to /dev/sdd2 using the “something else” option in the installer. I told it not to use the other drives in any way. So far as I know this install went fine apart from the boot problems. If I point the BIOS at sdd I was expecting my MATE install to work and if I had to manually add the others that would be fine. Instead it fails to boot at all. Pointing the BIOS back to sda all the old stuff works. I know I could probably add an entry for MATE to grub on sda but it feels really ugly and I really want my new install independent of the other drive.
I spent a couple of hours this evening messing around with grub and with the boot-repair tool, no progress to report (but a widely varied selection of error messages). I think I must have missed something really simple. I don’t mind reinstalling MATE on the new drive if there was something I should have done differently there. I guess the new drive could be changed to MBR partitioning but it feels a bit kludgey and everything I read tells me that GPT should be fine.
