Comment 3 for bug 2008948

It's understandable that Ubiquity is on lifesupport and issues have to have a certain seriousness to be addressed, I'll leave that to someone else to assess: the situation is that something has disrupted how Ubiquity is designed, namely that EFI is now the only valid bootloader and MBR isn't supported (right?).

There was nothing of interest in logs because the grub-installer message isn't very good (that could be a separate report).

This is the error message:

error: Failed to register the EFI boot entry: Operation not permitted.

I did trawl through all other approaches that I could find and I'm very sure that this error message is due to the MBR/GPT issue, since the error was 100% persistent in all attempts to fix it until I rewrote the partition table. I was debugging by running grub-install from chroot /target.

While using the wrong partition table, I could run grub-install --nonvram without errors, but that didn't leave /dev/sda in a bootable state.

> You do realize ubiquity is on ~life-support

Now you mention it, I remember the headlines -- I'll be installing Ubuntu 22.04 until 24.04 is out and stable :) I really like Ubiquity, but I have noticed that it has developed almost nothing on the UI surface in the past 4-5 years which of course makes it understandable from a user's POV: the old installer project has declined enough to make it necessary to rewrite. This issue is the kind of issue that could be triaged for ubuntu-desktop-installer as well: Does subiquity fail with an informative error message if the current partition table is detected to be invalid?

I also noticed advice that an efi partition must be a primary partition, but since GPT only has primary partitions, I'm not sure if that is necessary to validate.

Maybe the easiest method is to schedule a systematic triage of issues in Ubiquity to copy over the feedback that is relevant for ubuntu-desktop-installer. Once beyond simpler issues that are currently on the ubuntu-desktop-installer GitHub tracker, discovering a bug in the installer will become harder and harder and reporting things will get heavy on users and testers. Therefore, old feedback scenarios might be valuable. And might not :)