My new AMD video card

Hardware
161

efi boot with gpt, mbr with legacy boot!!!

162

You can have

  • legacy boot with mbr partitions or gpt partitions
  • uefi boot with gpt partitions

For legacy with gpt partitions, you need a bios-grub partition to take the place of the MBR sector.

With gpt it is posdible to have 2 grubs, one in the bios-boot partition, and one in the efi-system partition. That is how you make a usb drive boot with euther legacy or uefi.

I think I have done that on my hard disk(s) by not being careful.
In future, I will always put the --target option on grub-install.
The default in Void is --target=i386pc which means legacy
I think the default in Solus must be efi, and I am now not sure about Debian.
I think the best way is to override the default

Grub is a confusing utility
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB

163

Yeah, Laszlo says that is the way to go to futureproof your machine.
I will do that. Already have the gpt. That is the hard bit.

164

Hi Neville, my unprofessional opinion: Maybe it’s time to think about the bad boy, Grub Customizer. I know, most guys hate it, but even those agree it works. It would probably let you control (and boot) all your distros.

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165

No, not going there. Need to understand, not gloss over it.

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166

Hello all,
This is a summary and a windup of the topic. Thank you for your assistance and patience.

The final ultimate solution , for me, was to put Debian 11 on the shelf, and to install MX-21.2.1-ahs-x86_64.iso. So MX is to become my new ‘base’ distro to control grub , run printers, do my email, etc.
I did the MX install in EFI mode and installed MX and grub onto disk hd1. It boots OK and gives an MX controlled GRUB Menu, with MX,Void, Debian and Devuan all detected.
On disk hd0 at present I have a legacy boot controlled by Void. I shall attempt to convert that to an EFI boot. It is good insurance having grub on 2 disks.

MX-21.2.1-ahs-x86_64 definitely operates my graphics card with the amdgpu driver

amdgpu               8167424  9
gpu_sched              53248  1 amdgpu
i2c_algo_bit           16384  1 amdgpu
drm_dp_helper         159744  1 amdgpu
drm_ttm_helper         16384  1 amdgpu
ttm                    86016  2 amdgpu,drm_ttm_helper
drm_kms_helper        196608  4 drm_dp_helper,amdgpu
drm                   622592  11 gpu_sched,drm_dp_helper,drm_kms_helper,amdgpu,drm_ttm_helper,ttm
nevj@trinity:~/Desktop
$ lshw -c video
WARNING: you should run this program as super-user.
  *-display                 
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Navi 24 [Radeon RX 6400 / 6500 XT]
       vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
       version: c7
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=amdgpu latency=0
       resources: irq:53 memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d0000000-d01fffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:fb600000-fb6fffff memory:c0000-dffff
WARNING: output may be incomplete or inaccurate, you should run this program as super-user.
nevj@trinity:~/Desktop

and it does not hang during booting, like Debian11 did.

So, problem solved. time for a backup.
This topic is now closed. Thanks to all.
Neville

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