Re: Booting an old PC to SSD that the BIOS cannot see

[Chris Green]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 07:54:17PM -0800, Robert Furber via Support requests 
for the GRand Unified Bootloader wrote:
> Instead of sending them to the landfill, old PCs can be upgraded
> dramatically by replacing or supplementing the HDD by a SSD ..specially, a
> NVMe SSD. In my case, the NVMe SSD is mounted on a PCIe adapter card.
> 
> The catch is the BIOS in older PCs cannot see or be aware of a NVMe SSD.
> They can only boot from a HDD. However, after booting, the NVMe SSD becomes
> visible and accessible.
> 
> The challenge is to figure out when, during the Grub boot, does the NVMe SSD
> become accessible, and then figure how to reboot on it. For instance, would
> it be possible to set up a customized Grub on the HDD that would chain a
> second Grub on the SSD ..as soon as the PC becomes aware of its existence?
> Sort of along the lines of "Chain-loading and OS". But, instead of
> chain-loading Windows10, it would chain-load Ubuntu20 on the SSD?
> 
> I am really green. Up until 2 days ago, I had no idea Grub even existed.
> Since then, I have been reading up on Grub and I feel overwhelmed, under the
> impression that it could take me months to learn enough about Grub to figure
> out how to boot from my new SSD.
> 
> Can anyone help me or point me in the right direction?
> 
There's a long thread of mine about *exactly* this issue.  Yes, I
still have it in my mail system. There are 5 threads about it:-

2019-11-17  How to install grub onto an added drive?
2019-11-21  A further question on my "how to move to an NVME disk" question
2019-11-22  xubuntu 19.10 fails to install with /boot on different drive - 
grub-install error
2019-11-22  Clarification of what grub-install does, versus 
grub-mkconfig/update-grub
2019-11-23  I've finally got there with xubuntu 19.10 installed on my NVME disk 
- thanks everyone!

I (as you can see) did make it in the end.  There's a further related
thread:-

2020-01-10  How to change /boot disk?


You should be able to find and read all the above threads in the list
archive. If you can't get to them for some reason I can send them from
my mail folder to you if you want.

-- 
Chris Green