When grub install fails, suggest or perform corrective action

[Paul Schreiber]

I recently installed Ubuntu Server 17.04. The install took a few tries because grub-install failed without giving details (filed as #1717975).

Eventually, I ran grub-install from a shell prompt and got details:
grub-install: warning: Attempting to install GRUB to a disk with multiple partition labels. This is not supported yet..
grub-install: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required for RAID and LVM install.

The workaround was to wipe the beginning of the disk. Something like this:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=2047 count=1

It would be very helpful if the installer could fix this sort of problem automatically. Perhaps when rewriting the partition table, it could wipe labels. Perhaps it could dd over, as I did. Perhaps there's an even better solution.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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