Ubiquity copies efi boot information to wrong ESP

[Brady Dean]

I'm installing Ubuntu 16.04 onto an external HDD. My computer also has an internal Windows 10 HDD.

When at the partitioning stage, it selected for the boot loader to be installed onto the external HDD.

When Uniquity is installing the system, it mounts Windows 10's ESP and copies the Ubuntu/grub boot loaders over, when it should have mounted the ESP created on the external HDD. I attached a screenshot of lsblk to show what's happening. /dev/sda2 is the Win10 ESP and it's mounted to /target/boot/efi. /dev/sdb1 is the correct ESP but is not touched.

Because the boot information is not on the external HDD, the Windows 10 disk must be present to boot Ubuntu because the boot information pointing to Ubuntu is located on the Windows ESP.

Ubiquity is version 2.21.63.

I also attached the Ubiquity debug file, partman, and syslog. Sorry for putting them in a zip, can't attach more than 1 file.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[oldfred (oldfred)]

Ubiquity even says installing grub to sdb during install but overwrites my /EFI/ubuntu on sda.

[Brady Dean (2bdkid)]

I'm reattaching the debug stuff. I didn't realize it logged passwords.. I replaced them with asdfasdf.

[oldfred (oldfred)]

See also: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=746662

[Drew Walton (drewwalton19216801)]

The interesting thing about this bug (which really is a bug) is that ubiquity will happily create an ESP partition for you when you choose to install to sdb/sdc/anything that isn't sda, but won't even use it. It'll automatically mount the Windows ESP partition, which it really shouldn't be touching.

[Alex P. (alexp11223)]

Yeah the same bug in 19.04.

I have two disks: https://i.imgur.com/1BsKXIK.png 1 TB NVME SSD with Win 10 and empty 512 GB SATA SSD.

I want to install Ubuntu 19.04 on the second one.

It installs the bootloader on the first disk when I install it like this https://i.imgur.com/9gSK1wo.png

Now in UEFI I see both entries on the same disk, so ignores the disk selection in the dropdown menu at the bottom of the installer.

[Maxim (jestercore)]

I have a laptop with 2 SSDs and want to install Windows and Ubuntu separately.
Windows is installed on the first SSD and runs well.
Now I need to install Ubuntu on second SSD.
Every time I try to install it: Ubuntu installs GRUB to the first disk, to existing EFI partition alongside Windows bootloader. I tried all possible disk choosing options, and it still uses existing ESP. And, yep, it broke my Windows bootloader.

Please pay attention to this bug, it's ancient!