Failed install of 6.10 to a multi SATA system

[Andrew Young]

I tried to install 6.10 on my PC, but it failed with the error below. It has four SATA hard drives - no PATA HD.

SATA 0 has four partitions 1-NTFS with Windows 2000, 2-NTFS with data, 3-Ext2 (or3?) and 4-Swap.

SATA's 1, 2 and 3 are all NTFS.

The install appeared to go OK, until the GRUB section. I changed 'hd0' to 'sd0,3' - SATA drive 0, partion 3. The files appeared to be copied OK, but it then failed.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/ubiquity", line 166, in ?
    main()
  File "/usr/bin/ubiquity", line 161, in main
    install(sys.argv[1])
  File "/usr/bin/ubiquity", line 57, in install
    ret = wizard.run()
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py", line 305, in run
    self.process_step()
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py", line 856, in process_step
    self.progress_loop()
  File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/gtkui.py", line 628, in progress_loop
    raise RuntimeError, ("Install failed with exit code %s\n%s" %
RuntimeError: Install failed with exit code 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/ubiquity/install.py", line 1404, in ?
    install.run()
  File "/usr/share/ubiquity/install.py", line 385, in run
    self.configure_bootloader()
  File "/usr/share/ubiquity/install.py", line 1163, in configure_bootloader
    raise InstallStepError(
InstallStepError: GrubInstaller failed with code 1

[Matthew Woerly (nattgew)]

Thank you for your report. I apologize that no one has gotten back to you about this yet.
Do you still find this error when installing the latest Ubuntu?

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Sorry for the very late response. (sd0,3) isn't a valid GRUB device name; it's a sort of a mix between Linux device name syntax and GRUB device name syntax, and ends up being valid in neither. All GRUB hard disk devices are hd* regardless of what they're called in Linux.

From Ubuntu 8.04 onwards, we provide a combo box for possible GRUB devices rather than making you type it in, avoiding this kind of problem.