How did you have the machine booted when you were doing this? Off a flash drive?
Yes, it is a flash drive I used as a backup drive when I first started using your and Freds debians on the now trashed laptop when I was learning how to install your debians.
Is sdb a second hard drive in the machine or is it the flash drive?
The second drive 'sdb' is a SSD and your howto worked, I have the GPT part all done. You said make a flash grive first to use the installer but I had the flash drive already from before and it worked, until I borked it, now I cant get the magic back.
Is your flash drive broken because you accidentally put GRUB2 onto it?
No, not a grub2.cfg, it was still msdos because I was still trying to boot in msdod mode at the time.
Now have the original grubmenu.txt thats put in EMPTY when first installed on the laptop but changing the UUID number.
title StarterKit+Mate-remaster-amd64-2 on sda2
uuid 229421a7-0d64-410a-9f3f-ddd457e1f61f
kernel /EMPTY/live/vmlinuz1 edd=off noauto from=UUID:229421a7-0d64-410a-9f3f-ddd457e1f61f/EMPTYchanges=UUID:229421a7-0d64-410a-9f3f-ddd457e1f61f/EMPTY
initrd /EMPTY/live/initrd1.xz
Can you see anything wrong with it?
I get the new uuid from gparted-sda2-information, copy and paste into menu.1st. It should 'just work', I must have something wrong in BIOS settings.
I disabled fast boot didnt fix anything.
legacy usb support set to enable
usd device set to enable
In secure boot options 'other os' (legacy I guess?)
and 'windows UEFI mode'
I choose 'other os'
Secure boot might be the problem child.
From secure boot help.
'other os', select this option to get optimized functions when booting on windows non UEFI mode and microsoft non-compliant operating systems.
My take from this is that secure boot cant be turned off completely, still giving 'optimized functions' in legacy mode. Your self, BK, James Bond say 'turn it off'.
Is this the reason grub4dos is setting ram to 157 mb in an error message that only poped up once, wish I had wrote the full error message down.
I can start Fatdog in 'initrd-nano' mode, but in 'initrd' mode I get
'selected item cannot fit into memory'
Suggests to me that the wording in menu.1st is correct to get this far and something from secure boot is limiting ram in grub4dos to 157mb maybe.