[Bug 1891324] Re: Groovy Gorilla GRUB won't install to MBR

[Gerald Rozner]

In my particular case, my motherboard is EFI but can boot legacy or MBR.
I built it in 2013. Its an Asus Z77 and at this time has 7 SSD's for
testing different OS's. It has a bug whereby if one uses GPT EFI boot
and I move the cables to another drive for testing the EFI drive will no
longer boot. There are no more EFI firmware updates. There is no issue
for legacy boot. So all drives are partitioned MBR except Ubuntu 20.10.
I didn't even know about the bios-boot partition and GPT until
installing 20.10 and I saw the three partitions. That's when I manually
tried to partition it MBR which 9 out of 10 times comes up with a
warning about not booting and the drive is partitioned GPT. Once in a
while there will be a warning but it will remain MBR but after
completion it will boot but not complete loading the OS. I suspect most
people don't even know about the bug and have not reported it because
they just let Ubuntu format the drive automatically. If they're using
legacy boot and don't examine the partitions they have no idea how it
was partitioned.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1891324

Title:
  Groovy Gorilla GRUB won't install to MBR

Status in grub-installer package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Tried 3 different daily builds, multiple distributions on /dev/sda.
  Can't install GRUB to /dev/sda or /dev/sda1 which is my / pqrtition,
  either. Errors out and usually messes up the previous GRUB install.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.10
  Package: ubiquity 20.10.9
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-42.46-generic 5.4.44
  Uname: Linux 5.4.0-42-generic x86_64
  NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair
  ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu44
  Architecture: amd64
  CasperMD5CheckResult: pass
  CasperVersion: 1.452
  Date: Wed Aug 12 08:01:22 2020
  InstallCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/xubuntu.seed maybe-ubiquity quiet splash ---
  LiveMediaBuild: Xubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" - Alpha amd64 (20200811)
  SourcePackage: grub-installer
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

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