[ubuntu-uk] Annoying installation problem ....

[Barry Drake]

On 06/06/15 12:19, Colin Law wrote:

> How were you trying to boot off sdb (when it "would not boot")?>
> What exactly happened when you tried?

The installer requested that I restart the system and ejected the DVD as 
normal.  On restart, I first allowed the normal grub screen (from sda) 
to appear.  This was my normal, unaltered grub screen, so I then 
re-boooted, and used the BIOS boot menu (entered by pressing the F11 key 
on my system) to boot from sdb.  It failed with a message that seemed to 
indicate that sdb was not bootable.  I booted from the grub-screen into 
Mint, and used update-grub to make the grub menu pick up the Ubuntu 
installation, which it did.

> You should not have expected the grub on sda to be updated, as if I
> understand correctly what you did that should not have affected sda at
> all.

At this point, it had not affected sda at all.  I had to update grub 
manually on sda to get into Ubuntu at all.

> Are you sure you selected sdb as the drive to put grub on?  I think it
> may default to sda, but not sure.  Perhaps that is the difference
> between the first and second goes.

It did put grub on sdb - on a separate boot partition.  The grub.config 
file appeared to be correctly formed.  Why it would not boot when I 
selected sdb, I have no clue at all.  After that, I installed grub as a 
legacy bios boot, first onto the existing FAT32 partition, and then onto 
the same partition formatted ext4, and finally after deleting the boot 
partition entirely, installing grub to the main system ext partition.  I 
had no success with any of these, except to drop me into an emergency 
terminal when booting from sdb.  The x-server was not available and 
failed to start even manually from the command line.

When I decided to re-install, everything was the same as before, but the 
warning did not appear at all.  Grub was installed to sda only, and sdb 
was not at that time made bootable.  I did this manually later.  I 
didn't understand why there should have been any change in behaviour. 
Happy to answer any more questions, but I did not make an exact record 
of the error messages first time around as I had assumed that 
re-installing grub to sdb would fix the problem.  When that failed, I 
sat with pen in hand ....   but really got nothing helpful.

To be honest, the only place I have found similar annoying behaviour was 
when installing a legacy OS (Win 7) onto a removable drive in a caddy. 
I ended up having to unplug both internal drives physically to make a 
working version.  Now, I can plug that drive in and boot into it (sdc) 
and it thinks it is the only drive, so I am OK.  That really was annoying!!!

Regards,		Barry.
-- 
http://barrydrake.co.nr/