On 10/30/2016 1:34 AM, David C. Rankin wrote: > So I guess that leaves me with Ralfs solution of find the "Clear the CMOS" > jumper, clear the bios, replace the battery (I hope it is a standard 2032 or its > a trip to the battery store...) I think I have it figured out by process of elimination. I took another drive and formatted it GPT and created a 1M bios_boot partition as shown on the arch grub wiki. After grub install and reboot, exact same issue "hard disk error 0F3" no operating system found. So with 2 new drives in the laptop, neither would boot. sda as the GPT/bios_boot configured drive, and sdb as the MBR configured drive, no boot, but booting the install .iso from USB and "Boot Existing OS" worked fine on both (with changes to either 'hd1 0' and 'hd2 0', respectively. So with further reading, it looks like this bios/laptop will actually require a full UEFI partition scheme that the bios converts/boots in Legacy mode via a bios_boot partition on the drive. That is a screwy way of doing things, but makes sense given that the .iso has a full EFI setup and boots with no problem whatsoever. Question, for those familiar with UEFI schemes, since the .iso boots fine, is there anything else I need to do other than following the Arch grub wiki to construct the UEFI partition scheme and create the 1M bios_boot partition? The wiki says the bios_boot partition can be anywhere (partition number wise) as long as it lives in the first 2T of space. Any other thoughts or tweaks to the UEFI setup I ought to try for the next test? -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
