grub install fails on (hd0)

Syslog

You'll notice the other bug, where the installer says it can't unmount the profile importer, which it never needed because it can't find Vista profiles anyways, but that reportedly doesn't stop it from working unless you click 'Go Back' where it hits a fourth bug, where the installer dies and 'quitting it' silently leaves it undead in the background, and trying to install again fails silently.

I wiped the MBR and tried again, and this time it worked. The lack of any kind of feedback really disappoints.

Triaged to Incomplete. Reporter posted work around and is upset at slow response to this bug report. Reporter posts a valid use case: Vista on first partition and trying to place GRUB on second partition without messing up the Vista boot record.

>Triaged to Incomplete
I didn't give enough information? I can (and have, repeatedly) reproduce by installing Vista first and then trying to install Ubuntu. Do you want the MBR or something to find out why grub fails?

Thanks for your quick reply. Triaged to Confirmed. One work around is to create a GRUB boot floppy. Instead of using the MBR to load the 1st Stage, it uses the floppy. The menu.lst file is stored on the Linux partition and boots normally. I'm not aware of a way to boot GRUB without an MBR change (which could affect Vista) but you can boot off of a USB stick, floppy or CD ROM that provides the 1st stage of GRUB to give the the selection menu.

>you can boot off of a USB stick, floppy or CD ROM that provides the 1st stage of GRUB
I prefer wiping the drive and installing Ubuntu before Vista, as that works and lets me boot without a dongle.

Grub doesn't seem to handle a drive partitioned by Vista's installer, and Ubuntu's installer doesn't handle a GRUB failure very well, so what can I do to help fix both of those?

Hi, sorry about the lack of developer response up to now. TerryG has been focusing on workarounds but I'd like to actually fix the bug ...

This looks a little bit like bug 149832, but it clearly isn't quite the same thing. I've looked over your debug logs in detail, and it seems that there was already an ext3 file system on the second partition of your ATA disk. However, I'm guessing that you didn't run the installer in debug mode to start with, and that perhaps this was a leftover from a previous installation.

Could you describe, in as much detail as possible, the partitioning setup before you started trying to install Ubuntu, and exactly what you told Ubuntu's partitioner to do the first time you ran it?

If you're in a position to wipe the disk and duplicate this, that would be fantastic. In that case, what I would like to get is a copy of the partition table after GRUB fails, which you can extract in textual form by running this command from a live CD:

  sudo od -Ax -tx1 -N512 /dev/hda

My suspicion is that GRUB is failing because hda2 has the wrong partition type; you would be able to see this in fdisk too.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. However, your crash report didn't yield the required information. Please go ahead and submit a new crash report if it crashes again with the latest available version of the package. Thanks in advance for your cooperation and understanding.