Comment 2 for bug 161889

Thank you for your answer.
You are right to say that I could install grub on IDE 1 master, so the choice on witch OS I want to load will be on a higher level. But I wanted to make an Ubuntu installation completely independent from my Windows installation. With this purpose in mind I bought a new HD. And I'm not the only one. There are many people that installed Gutsy on external HD with same purpose and that reported the same problem.

I disagree with you. I still think that there is a bug.
1 - When installing Gutsy, I followed the installation wizard. And there is an option where I want to install boot loader (advanced tab) and my option was to do it on hd1 (IDE1 slave) and not in hd0 (IDE1 master, in witch I have Windows OS). So, if after a normal and clean installation it didn't boot, there is a bug.
2 – You are saying that Grub swapped the two HDs, that is, HD on IDE1 slave becomes hd0,0. If so, how do you explain that after booting Gutsy, command fdisk -l reports IDE1 mater as hda and IDE1 slave as hdb, and even Grub reports as installed in IDE1 slave (hd1,0)?

I know that Linux is made by different hands and heads, but when putted all together on a distribution package, standardization should be applied. For a newbie as I am, to find on a installation wizard two nicknames for the same drive is quite difficult to understand and it could lead to an incorrect installation. At this point of the play, Grub should be referring partition 1 of IDE1 Master as hda1 and not as hd0,0, partition 1 of IDE1 slave as hdb1 and not as hd1,0 etc, etc
Regards,
Luiz