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I have a server box that runs Gentoo off an SSD with GPT partitioning. My BIOS is rather old, and for some reason it doesn't seem to be able to boot off the MBR of the GPT disk, so I am booting it from the boot loader of a system rescue disc installed on a 2Gb SD card.

I would like, however, to use an old MMC card I have (32Mb) as a boot disk. I have created an ext2 partition on it, put in all the boot files, and installed GRUB on its MBR using the command

grub-install /dev/sdc

and put all my configuration in the /grub/grub.cfg file on that disk. It also contains a few kernels and the usual boot files on the root of the drive, and a boot -> . symlink.

Now the BIOS will boot from the flash disk, but I see no boot menu, just a black screen with GRUB written at the top left corner. Looks like my configuration file is not even loaded.

Any idea how to diagnose this further would be very helpful.

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The "some reason" is that so far only I and H. Peter Anvin have written MBR bootstrap programs, for old PC/AT and PC98 firmwares, that understand the EFI partition table and the new "startable" flag from version 2.3.1 of the UEFI specification. – JdeBP Jan 20 at 0:44
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