installer crashed upon installing grub on usb drive

[Francesco]

Trying to install Ubuntu 10 on an external hard drive (sda) with 100gb of free space on it.
Run Ubunto from live CD - works properly
Click "Install", asks some questions.
Answer to install ubuntu in sda and to create its own partition where he founds the larger contiguous space.
Asks where to install grub (defoult hd0). I changed it into sd0, as my hd (the internal disk of this laptop) runs windows, and I do not want to mess around with it. Tried to do everything on the external USB disk sda.
Installation creates partitions, run for 20 minutes or so, and at the end, while installing grub, outputs this fatal error.

I guess something went wrong with the location to install grub.
Provided I do not want to overwrite in the hd windows disk, and try play safe on the sda external drive, where can grub be set ?

at present this external drive has two partitions (sda1 and sda2 used for other stuff) and 100gb free space, where the installer were trying to install ubuntu.

attacched the message that came out at the end.

thanks to anybody there taking care of this problem

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

[Vassilis Pandis (pandisv)]

Could you please attach /var/log/syslog and /var/log/partman to this bug, following the directions in http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingUbiquity/AttachingLogs? Thanks in advance.

[Francesco (nardifra)]

The problem comes from a mistake of mine, not from a system bug.

Asking to install grub in /dev/sda instead of sd0 resulted in a correct installation of Ubuntu on an USB esternal drive and grub on it's boot sector.

thanks

francesco

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

As you say, more validation is needed here. This is also bug 90575.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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