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

[Dan Bungert]

> Does subiquity fail with an informative error message if the current
partition table is detected to be invalid?

Subiquity screens for this sort of problem ahead of time, it has checks
for if we think the system will be bootable or not and only allows the
user to proceed if we think it will boot.  Subiquity also knows how to
handle all four cases of (BIOS boot, UEFI boot) x (DOS partition table,
GPT), so it is actually valid to do something like UEFI boot on a MSDOS
partition table.

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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.

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