Comment 10 for bug 148840

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.