I'm trying to run 'grub-install /dev/sda', it stays stuck on 'Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub' after leaving it for an hour, nothing happens. I have tried removing all Grub related packages and installing grub-legacy several times, to no avail.

The machine is quite an old one and is an offline sandbox for a friends kid who likes to tinker with older OSes. The hard disk has failed in it so I have donated an old drive to get the machine back up and running for him, as the menu.lst is a lot easier to modify than the newer grub.cfg, he would like the older grub back. Can anyone shed light on this?

I've done a few searches particular for Debian 8, but the closest I can find is for Ubuntu here, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Gr...to_GRUB_Legacy

I have tried to use both the grub rescue disk and the command line listed in the link above.

The MBR must point to wherever grub lives.

The grub config files and menu.lst must name where the bootable os lives.

Some of the old grub versions try to install grub on wherever you booted from. That's not what you want. After booting from your rescue disk, you must verify that the MBR goes to the grub you want and those grub files go to the os you want.

Have you done that?

I think I ran into the same problem. I've got an ten years old server, booting via CF-card. After setting up Jessie on a host with VirtualBox without problems and with grub2, the server didn't boot from the CF-card. Trying to follow the mentioned procedure to roll back to grub-legacy, even with "native installation" the "stage1"-file could not be found.
After installing grub-legacy with apt-get the /boot/grub directory is not populated with the grub files (stage1 ..).
The solution was to copy the files in /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc into /boot/grub and redo the "native installation".
I could imagine that the package (deb installation archive) could be set up a little bit better, but I am not familiar with creating packages. So my question: A feature or a bug?
Hope, it helps.