Ubiquity failed to install grub in precise 20120419.1

[Jane Atkinson]

This happened during an install alongside an existing one. On rebooting after the installation, the previous test install booted instead of this one. Running "update-grub" from that install allowed me to reboot into the fresh installation.

I got suspicious when running apt-get update as part of the testing routine produced a complete reload of the package lists from the repos, and looked further. But someone who was installing alongside Windows for the first time might well be thinking that nothing had happened at all.

Apart from that, it seems to be running correctly.

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/985971

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I notice that GRUB was installed to /dev/sdb; I expect that that is probably not the disk that your BIOS is actually booting from. Did you select this manually, or was it automatically selected for you? Also, could you tell me about the disk layout in this machine? I'd like to know how you were booting the installer (CD/DVD, USB, something else), and which of the disks sda, sdb, and sdc are removable.

[Jane Atkinson (irihapeti)]

I was doing the "install alongside" option, which doesn't give the user any choice as to which drive is used (which is one of the things I don't like about it). That appears to apply to grub installation as well as OS installation.

The machine has two sata drives, /dev/sda (80GB) and /dev/sdb (500GB). /dev/sdb is the drive with my working installations and I'm using the other one for ISO testing. Usually, grub gets installed to /dev/sda

On this occasion, I was installing from a 1GB SD card, which I think would have been /dev/sdc. That's the only one that's removable.

[Jane Atkinson (irihapeti)]

In case it's not clear, /dev/sda is set to boot first in the BIOS. To boot from the SD card, I have to select the boot menu.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I think we could use some redesign of "install alongside", but there's no chance of that for 12.04. I'm surprised to find that affecting the GRUB location, though, because it's not supposed to. Any chance you could do an installation in debug mode so that I can get a bit more information? Add 'debug-ubiquity' as a boot parameter, and just take care not to use a valuable password since the password will appear in the debug log. Then attach the same set of logs to this bug.

[Jane Atkinson (irihapeti)]

@Colin:

Here are the logs, as requested.

Incidentally, I notice that it refers to the 500GB drive as /dev/sdf.

Understood that nothing is likely to be done in time for precise. I suspect that most people who have more than one drive would be using manual partitioning. That's my usual preference, and the only reason I was using the install-alongside option was for ISO testing.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ubiquity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]