A server has a GPT-partitioned disk but its firmware boots in legacy BIOS mode. grub-install refuses to embed its core image and warns that it has nowhere to put it. Which partition must the layout include?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 102. Linux installation and package management hard
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The options
Correct A small unformatted BIOS boot partition (GPT type code EF02)
Correct. On GPT there is no post-MBR gap to embed core.img in, so GRUB needs a dedicated ~1 MiB partition of type EF02 that carries no filesystem.
Not correct An EFI System Partition mounted at /boot/efi
Wrong. The ESP is what a UEFI firmware reads. Firmware running in legacy BIOS mode never looks at it.
Not correct A separate ext4 /boot partition marked bootable
Wrong. A separate /boot holds the kernel and GRUB modules but gives the embedded core image nowhere to live; the boot flag alone does not create the space GRUB needs.
Not correct An extended partition containing the root logical partition
Wrong. Extended and logical partitions are an MBR concept and do not exist on a GPT-labelled disk.
Why
In BIOS booting the firmware loads only the 440-byte boot code in the MBR, which is too small for GRUB, so GRUB embeds a larger core image nearby. On an MBR disk it uses the gap between the MBR and the first partition; on a GPT disk that gap is occupied by the partition table itself, so a BIOS boot partition of type EF02 must be provided instead. It is never formatted and never mounted, which is why it does not appear in /etc/fstab.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page grub-install(8)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 102 and space the ones you get wrong.
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