debian – trulyone.net blog

Debian installer fails to install GRUB: solved

I recently installed the latest version of Debian on my laptop. I always do this when a new version comes out rather than upgrade, I prefer a fresh install which gives a sort of spring clean to my system. Unfortunately one of the final steps, installing the bootloader, failed. The error message was:

Unable to install GRUB in dummy. 
Executing 'grub-install dummy' failed. 
This is a fatal error.

You can’t exactly have a productive system if it won’t boot so how do we get around this little conundrum?

26 Sep 18

Testing server configuration with VirtualBox

Before setting up a new server on a live machine it can sometimes be useful to set up a virtual machine in order to test the configuration. This will allow you to play around with settings and even make mistakes without causing harm to a real system. I like to do this so I can change things over and over until it’s just right, then I can copy the final configuration over to the live system. In this example I will set up a Debian 9 virtual server in Oracle VirtualBox and configure so it can be accessed by the host machine and over a LAN. This means the configuration can be tested from different devices.