Comment 27 for bug 414996

I was plagued by this bug as well while installing Lucid from a Live USB - after the install when I rebooted with the USB key removed, the machine gave me an error `error: symbol grub_puts_ not found' and dropped me into grub-rescue mode. Seeking to fix grub from the Live USB, I rebooted with the key inserted - however this time the machine booted up, and instead of going into the live environment, it presented me with my installed desktop environment! When I checked for where grub was installed, it reported as being installed in /dev/sda1, which referred to my USB drive; my hard drive was assigned to /dev/sdbY. Reinstalling grub from this environment to my boot partition (I had separate boot and root partitions) by mounting the boot partition as mentioned in the Community Documentation (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2) as the first method for fixing grub did nothing but transfer me to a grub> prompt from grub-rescue> prompt on the next reboot (without the USB key). Rebooting with the USB key inserted, and reinstalling grub by running sudo grub-install /dev/sda (the second method for fixing grub on the Community Documentation) installed grub on the root partition instead of the boot partition, which caused problems on the next reboot again. I was in no mood to sit there and debug this all day, so I rolled back to Karmic.

I see two potential issues here - one that on a fresh install, the wrong drive is selected, or at least the user is not asked for where he wants grub to reside. The second is that upon running grub-install to a /dev/sdX, the installer does not check for the presence of a separate boot partition, but installs grub to the root partition.

I believe this is a regression from Karmic, which also employs grub2 and there were no such issues in Karmic - as I verified after rolling back to it. I am hesitant to try installing Lucid, which otherwise seemed to be a solid release, until this issue is resolved.