Grub not installed (or installed on wrong dev) on system booting from second SATA device

[Tero Tilus]

Binary package hint: debian-installer

The box has Asus M3N78-EM motherboard, RAID functionality disabled from BIOS. Spindle HDD on SATA1 and SSD on SATA2 port (port labels printed on mobo). BIOS boot order all the time: 1) USB 2) SSD

I did a fresh install of current karmic using netboot image on usb pen drive. I deleted all existing partitions from both HDD and SSD (both had previous Ubuntu installations, were marked bootable and had old grub), configured SSD as root fs and HDD as /home and marked only the root fs on SSD bootable. Reboot after installation hung to "GRUB loading, please wait..." (presumably old grub on SSD). I booted to rescue system and fdisk displayed both disks bootable. I removed bootable flag from HDD using fdisk and reinstalled grub (there was a menuitem for that). Then system booted fine.

I assume these symptoms were due grub failing to install properly during installer phase or (more probably I guess) the installer installing grub to first SATA disk (HDD) instead of the disk the system booted off.

This might have bits in common with #8497 (or might not).

[Tero Tilus (tero-tilus)]

Looks like I'm able to reproduce this with Asus A8V, single SATA drive and karmic amd64 netboot on USB pen drive.

BIOS boot order was SATA hdd first. I used boot device selection menu (hit F8 during POST) to boot from pen drive. I did a fresh install using defaults (hit ret most of the time). Disk was non-partitioned. After partitioning step I noticed that pen drive was /dev/sda and hdd /dev/sdb. Reboot after installation gave black screen with a blinking cursor. Reboot from the pen drive gave "GRUB Geom Error" twice and a blinking cursor.

[Tero Tilus (tero-tilus)]

...so not only the target system was unbootable, the installer managed to screw up the pen drive too, which also was unbootable after installation.