Installing from sd card fails on some hardware

[Will Cooke]

I can't reproduce this on my Dell Inspiron 11, but it does happen on a Dell XPS13.

1. Download Ubuntu and write it to an SD Card
  Note: The SD Card was written using Etcher from a Mac - maybe that has an effect?
2. Boot from the SD Card and do a default install (UEFI is on)
3. When trying to write grub to the boot partition grub-installer chooses to write to /dev/mmcblk0 instead of /dev/sda and fails.

[Will Cooke (willcooke)]

Subscribing @jamiebennett who has hardware where this can be reproduced.

[Jamie Bennett (jamiebennett)]

Another data point, to be able to boot the SD Card you need to press f12 for the boot screen during start-up and select legacy boot: sd card.

SD Card is a generic 16GB card from Amazon that came part of a package with a Raspberry Pi3 (branded with a Raspberry Pi logo). This (micro)SD card is housed in an adapter (also Raspberry Pi branded).

Finally, this happened whilst trying to install Bionic.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Please attach the logs from the installer once the installation finishes or crashes. It can be found in /var/log/syslog from the live session.

EFI or not probably should not matter here if the install fails in the first place; especially since you're installing from an SD card booted in legacy mode (so, not EFI, and whether EFI is enabled or not depends on how you answer the prompt to "force EFI installation").

I do remember seeing an issue with the partition number parsing before, so I'll look in up in past commits to see if we might have regressed there.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Any news on this?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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