Kickseed installation from USB and MBR

Bug #614399 reported by Sabst
10
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
kickseed (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Hi,
I have been using Kickseed on Ubuntu for a while (Karmic) and that worked pretty well.
Now, since I switched to Lucid, the installation works but Grub is installed on the wrong disk: the one holding the USB key.
So, the installed system has no boot (manual grub-install... is needed) and the boot of the USB key is replaced by the boot into the new installation.

I have seen others with a similar issue (no solution that I could use in Lucid though) on other Linuxes and versions.
I have also seen that new options or parameters have been added (ignoredisk) but they do not work on Lucid.

Does any body have a workaround on Lucid for this problem? Is there a patch? What did I miss?

Thanks for the help,
Stéphane.

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

Please attach your Kickstart file, with any passwords or other sensitive information removed.

Changed in kickseed (Ubuntu):
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

If you want me to look at the 'ignoredisk' bit, though, please file a separate bug. I only work on one issue per bug report, otherwise it gets impossible to manage.

Revision history for this message
Sabst (sabst) wrote :

Here is the kickstart file I used.
Note that I investigated many different combinations of options without success (zerombr or not, bootloader location on mbr or partition...).

Also, I do not have the option to change the drives order from the bios, in my case the USB key is always sda and the disk where the installation is made is sdb. I have not found a way to change this order elsewhere.

I did not have this issue in karmic using the same target systems.

Thank you for your attention,
Stephane.

Revision history for this message
Sabst (sabst) wrote :

Regarding ignoredisk and at that point, I am only interested in the feature if this is a way to make the basic installation described above work.
I will create a new bug report if needed. You can ignore the request for now.

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

[Expired for kickseed (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

Changed in kickseed (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → Expired
Colin Watson (cjwatson)
Changed in kickseed (Ubuntu):
status: Expired → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Tore Olsen (toreolsensan) wrote :

I recently ran into this issue (with Ubuntu 18.04): My USB memory stick is identified as sda, and there is no way to make grub install onto the hard drive sdb using Ubuntu's kickstart feature. I'm not sure how common it is that sda is assigned to USB, but I'm pretty certain installing from USB is far more common than DVD, so I suspect this is really a blocker for kickstart installs with Ubuntu on modern systems.

There's been no real activity on this bug, so I wonder if there's anything that can be done to make any progress?

It would be nice if the Ubuntu documentation could acknowledge that the --boot-drive and --driveorder options aren't supported. I believe I only discovered this fact after adding DEBCONF_DEBUG=5 to the boot options.

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