[Bug 2008948] Re: Ubiquity does not raise an informative error when device for bootloader has MBR (should be GPT)

[Benjamin Bach]

It's understandable that Ubiquity is on lifesupport and issues have to
have a certain seriousness to be addressed, I'll leave that to someone
else to assess: the situation is that something has disrupted how
Ubiquity is designed, namely that EFI is now the only valid bootloader
and MBR isn't supported (right?).

There was nothing of interest in logs because the grub-installer message
isn't very good (that could be a separate report).

This is the error message:

error: Failed to register the EFI boot entry: Operation not permitted.

I did trawl through all other approaches that I could find and I'm very
sure that this error message is due to the MBR/GPT issue, since the
error was 100% persistent in all attempts to fix it until I rewrote the
partition table. I was debugging by running grub-install from chroot
/target.

While using the wrong partition table, I could run grub-install
--nonvram without errors, but that didn't leave /dev/sda in a bootable
state.

> You do realize ubiquity is on ~life-support

Now you mention it, I remember the headlines -- I'll be installing
Ubuntu 22.04 until 24.04 is out and stable :) I really like Ubiquity,
but I have noticed that it has developed almost nothing on the UI
surface in the past 4-5 years which of course makes it understandable
from a user's POV: the old installer project has declined enough to make
it necessary to rewrite. This issue is the kind of issue that could be
triaged for ubuntu-desktop-installer as well: Does subiquity fail with
an informative error message if the current partition table is detected
to be invalid?

I also noticed advice that an efi partition must be a primary partition,
but since GPT only has primary partitions, I'm not sure if that is
necessary to validate.

Maybe the easiest method is to schedule a systematic triage of issues in
Ubiquity to copy over the feedback that is relevant for ubuntu-desktop-
installer. Once beyond simpler issues that are currently on the ubuntu-
desktop-installer GitHub tracker, discovering a bug in the installer
will become harder and harder and reporting things will get heavy on
users and testers. Therefore, old feedback scenarios might be valuable.
And might not :)

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to ubiquity in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2008948

Title:
  Ubiquity does not raise an informative error when device for
  bootloader has MBR (should be GPT)

Status in ubiquity package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Thanks for a good installation experience :) I have one unfortunate
  experience that took me many many hours to work through.

  Ubiquity should raise an error when a device chosen for the bootloader
  has an unsupported MBR table and not GPT. AFAICT, Ubuntu's grub
  installation only supports EFI so that requires GPT.

  Error suggestion: "Invalid partition table detected. Cannot complete
  installation. Please install bootloader on another device or choose
  New Partition Table (warning: All data will be lost)."

  User experience is this: I chose "Something else" to do manual
  partitioning. I tried many different options for partitioning and
  restarted the installation many times. They all lead to a grub
  installation error at the final step after copying all files. As a
  user, I'd persistently try to make the existing partitions work to
  avoid copying gigabytes of data in and out of the drive.

  It's possible to claim that manual partitioning should be 100% the
  user's responsibility, but I would still expect an error to be raised
  if something in the setup is incompatible.

  The error from grub itself is also not informative.

  By rewriting the partition table, I got a valid GPT layout and the
  installation succeeded.

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/2008948/+subscriptions