Elementary OS 5.0 Juno grub installation error [Single Boot]

Question

I have Asus laptop with 24GB SSD and 1TB HDD and the main idea was to use all SSD space for / and 10GB HDD space for Swap and rest of the HDD space for /home partition.

Going through the installation when asked about installation type I chose 'Something else' and managed partitions on my own following the main idea and placing Swap and /home partitions as logical and / as primary. All HDD partitions were on /dev/sda and SSD partition was on /dev/sdb.

In 'Device for bootloader installation' dropdown I chose /dev/sdb as there was my / partition and went through with the installation.

All went well until grub tried to be installed - I got message:

Executing 'grub-install /dev/sdb' failed. Fatal Error..

Now I am not sure what could have gone sideways and I would appreciate the help.

Also it got me thinking do I even need grub bootloader if I am planning on having only Elementary OS installed on my laptop?

Answer 1

[UPDATE]

I managed to fix the problem.

The problem was in a single boot. When you have Windows installed and are trying to have dual boot, as far as I understand, you do not ran into problem like this because Windows creates boot partition automatically, but when you install single boot Linux you have to do this on your own.

I got it to work by splitting SSD space into two partitions: EFI partition that takes 200MB, and the rest of the space for ext4 / partition.

For Device for bootloader installation I chose /dev/sdb1 which is my EFI partition. Then I started the installation and everything worked.

Hope this helps.