Installing 10.04 to 2TB disk, does not boot

[Dave Howorth]

Christopher Chan wrote:
>> Right, but Matthias is not using RAID for this attempt.
> 
> Well, we don't know that. He has five 2TB disks if I remember correctly 
> and he did not give us the information of everything this time round.

I thought it was pretty clear when he wrote

> - The above tests were done with only one disk installed (the Tranquil
> PC Barebones Server will take up to 5 disks).

>>> debian installer does not yet properly support gpt (or at least, the
>>> version that ubuntu uses since there does appear to be a fix/recipe for
>>> gpt in Debian's some time late last year)
>>>
>>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/partman-base/+bug/506670
>> I don't really understand all that. It seems to be saying that lucid
>> should work as long as there is a grub_bios partition, which Matthias
>> has created and as described at
>>
>> http://grub.enbug.org/BIOS_Boot_Partition
> 
> That's assuming the installer did everything else correctly...right now, 
> an error message claiming no bootable disk seems to indicate zero 
> installation of grub to any MBR of his disks...

That's one of the points I don't understand. As I understand the page
above, the installer doesn't need to understand anything at all. It just
tells grub to install in the MBR as usual and *grub* then notices the
GPT and the grub_bios partition and installs appropriately. So the
installer doesn't need to even recognize the fact that the disk has a
GPT, let alone have to do anything about it. But maybe I'm misreading
the article.

>>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=409073
>> I'm not yet very familiar with Ubuntu. That link seems to show a fix in
>> grub2 1.95+20070505-1 as of June 2007, or am I misunderstanding it? And
>> lucid uses 1.98? As at:
> 
> Nope. That is a report FROM June 2007 with what looks like a fix 
> sometime last year.

I still don't follow that, sorry. All the dates I see in message 18 are
2007. It's a very confusing layout to me. Where does it say 2009? I'd
like to be able to read the bug reports properly!

> It is down to this: Does the installer, whether the Ubuntu installer on 
> the LiveCD or the debian installer on the alternate cd, know how to 
> ensure a working installation of grub2 on a gpt partition based disk 
> when the computer does not use EFI firmware but BIOS firmware.

Indeed. As I explained above, I don't think the installer needs to know.
It just needs to tell grub to install in the MBR in the traditional way.
But who knows :)

Cheers, Dave