installer installs GRUB to a wrong drive
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
One Hundred Papercuts |
New
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Undecided
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Unassigned | ||
ubiquity |
New
|
Undecided
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Unassigned |
Bug Description
Ubuntu installer, at least in text mode, does not ask what drive to use to install GRUB to. For example, if my computer has these IDE drives:
primary master - Seagate 80 GB
primary slave - Toshiba DVD-ROM
secondary master - Seagate 500 GB
secondary slave - Hitachi 500 GB
and secondary master is selected as boot device in BIOS, and I install Ubuntu on it, the installer does not ask where to install GRUB but installs it to primary master, silently overwriting the boot loader that I had on it. From my experience, the installer almost always selects a wrong drive.
To fix this, I start the installer in Expert mode, either by pressing F6 twice at the beginning of installation (no longer works in 9.04 BTW) or by typing priority=low at the end of the kernel command line, but this is not convenient if I only want to specify where to install GRUB. Please, modify the installer to ask where to install GRUB. Installers of all other major Linux distros do this already
In the live CD installer, at least, you can pick a location to install the boot-loader by pressing 'Advanced' on the last page of the wizard.
However, in Mark Shuttleworth's own words:
"Advanced" menu's are sign of conceptual problems and limitations [..] They are *very* difficult for users because they say "this is hard" which is a disincentive for users to explore them, and because without being explored, users have no idea what is in there!
So, let's avoid those :-)