Comment 16 for bug 1671605

To demonstrate the issue, I booted a openstack vm, with 2 disks (vda, vdb). This is booted bios (not uefi).

## wipe the disk
$ disk="/dev/vdb"
$ sudo umount $disk
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=$disk bs=1M count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1048576 bytes (1.0 MB, 1.0 MiB) copied, 0.00783073 s, 134 MB/s

$ sudo udevadm settle

## attempt installation of grub to /dev/vdb
$ sudo grub-install "$disk"
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: error: unable to identify a filesystem in hostdisk//dev/vdb; safety check can't be performed.

## now partition it and try
$ (echo unit: sectors; echo label: dos; echo 2048,) | sudo sfdisk --force $disk
Checking that no-one is using this disk right now ... OK

Disk /dev/vdb: 40 GiB, 42949672960 bytes, 83886080 sectors
...
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/vdb1 2048 83886079 83884032 40G 83 Linux
...

$ sudo udevadm settle
$ sudo grub-install $disk
Installing for i386-pc platform.
Installation finished. No error reported.