installer installs GRUB to a wrong drive

[Dmitry Mityugov]

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

[Lightbreeze (nedhoy-gmail)]

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 :-)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This is a duplicate of bug 356095, and probably others. It is *really* not a paper cut; this is a complex implementation issue with all kinds of complicated warts.

In many cases the problem is simply that we have no good way to map Linux devices to GRUB devices right now, and end up installing to the wrong device by mistake. I have some hopes that this problem will be resolved with the switch to GRUB 2, without the need for additional UI.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

By the way, in future, please attach ubiquity bugs to the ubiquity source package in Ubuntu, not to the upstream ubiquity project. We don't use the latter for bug tracking.

[Dmitry Mityugov (dmitry-mityugov)]

Thank you everybody for your attention to this problem.

Based on previous comments, let me rephrase its description to:

Ubuntu text mode installer should ask the target location of the boot loader. It does not require any automatic mappings between Linux and GRUB devices, just a list of available drives and a way to specify one of them manually (like it is already done in Expert installation mode). This feature would be especially important for Ubuntu Server, as it does not have a GUI installer, where this feature is available by pressing Advanced button

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

No, sorry, getting this right really does require a sane mapping between Linux and GRUB devices due to the way GRUB works. In any case, let's not try to design it until we see how well this sort of thing works in GRUB 2? It's reputed to be much better. Finally, we're well aware of the general problem and there is no need to fine-tune bug statuses.

(Note that this bug is marked as a duplicate and we should not continue discussion here.)

[Dmitry Mityugov (dmitry-mityugov)]

Sorry for continuing it here but

> No, sorry, getting this right really does require a sane mapping

this feature is already available in the text mode installer in expert mode. What I am asking it to get it available in default installation mode

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Making it available in the default installation mode as it stands would be an extra question, which we do not want to have to ask. We need to think about it a bit harder than just saying "oh, we'll just ask another question" (which, remember, would be utter gobbledegook to many people and I almost guarantee you would result in another "paper cut" bug to turn it back off!).

The answer may be a more sophisticated "expert mode" which is not quite so verbose, or it may be something else.

[Dmitry Mityugov (dmitry-mityugov)]

(1) ask this extra question only when more than one physical drive in the computer detected, or

(2) do it like with drive partitioning: offer automatic (default) and manual methods of installing the boot loader. No gobbledegooks :-)

[nUboon2Age (nuboon2age)]

Still same problem in 10.4 even though Grub2 being used. I made a more complete report on bug #356095