Ubiquity does not raise an informative error when device for bootloader has MBR (should be GPT)
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
ubiquity (Ubuntu) |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Thanks for a good installation experience :) I have one unfortunate experience that took me many many hours to work through.
Ubiquity should raise an error when a device chosen for the bootloader has an unsupported MBR table and not GPT. AFAICT, Ubuntu's grub installation only supports EFI so that requires GPT.
Error suggestion: "Invalid partition table detected. Cannot complete installation. Please install bootloader on another device or choose New Partition Table (warning: All data will be lost)."
User experience is this: I chose "Something else" to do manual partitioning. I tried many different options for partitioning and restarted the installation many times. They all lead to a grub installation error at the final step after copying all files. As a user, I'd persistently try to make the existing partitions work to avoid copying gigabytes of data in and out of the drive.
It's possible to claim that manual partitioning should be 100% the user's responsibility, but I would still expect an error to be raised if something in the setup is incompatible.
The error from grub itself is also not informative.
By rewriting the partition table, I got a valid GPT layout and the installation succeeded.
Adding this for context.