Dan Norton composed on 2017-12-04 07:32 (UTC-0500):
Note your posts are still coming from the future. Today ATM in zone -0500 it is
still the 3rd of December.
Felix Miata wrote:
I'm pretty sure that was not OP's intent, i.e., none of Grub at all in MBR.
Yes, no grub in mbr - unless installer insists.
...
FWIW, this done just now:
# gdisk /dev/sda
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.10
Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Command (? for help): b
Enter backup filename to save: mbrforgpt
The operation has completed successfully.
Command (? for help): q
I don't see anything above to indicate a boot flag has been set anywhere. That
HP might have firmware that insists one exists.
http://www.lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/BIOSBootGPT
# ls -l mbr*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17920 Dec 4 05:47 mbrforgpt
# mc -v mbrforgpt
The above shows 0x55AA at +0x1FE (Boot signature [1]).
That proves a partition table exists, not whether there is requisite code in
the 446 bytes preceding the table.
Also, the search for 'ERROR:' is not found in the entire 17920 bytes of
file mbrforgpt.
'ERROR: ' you are encountering is coming from the BIOS/firmware, not anything
on the disk.