search

linuxmint / ubiquity

Installer
https://www.linuxmint.com
46 stars 49 forks source link

installer wrote bootloader to the wrong disk #16

Open cjlee112 opened 9 years ago

cjlee112 commented 9 years ago

Reported by two separate users on LM17 and LM17.1, one using installer DVD, the other installing from a USB key. Full details of our reports here: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=189595

To summarize, on a multi-disk system, user chose to install Mint on /dev/sdc, but the installer ran grub-install /dev/sda (despite having correctly installed Mint OS files on /dev/sdc). As a result, attempting to boot /dev/sdc will fail (because no bootloader was installed on this disk), and attempting to boot /dev/sda will ACTUALLY boot the fresh Mint install on /dev/sdc (because the bootloader on /dev/sda actually boots the OS from /dev/sdc)! This makes the user think that the Mint installer erased /dev/sda and put a fresh Mint install on /dev/sda (which is NOT the case). This could lead to catastrophic data loss.

Both of the reported cases involved LUKS + LVM installs; not sure if that is an important factor.

cjlee112 commented 7 years ago

Two and a half years later, this bug is still present in all versions of Mint I've tested: I just retested 17.1 MATE 64bit and 18.2 MATE 64bit as follows:

MarjaE2 commented 1 year ago

Still present in Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon 64-bit installer.

This resulted in

  1. A series of "Executing 'grub-install /dev/sda' failed. This is a fatal error" when trying to use a T2 mac to install Linux Mint to an external disk.
  2. An unbootable Linux installation without its own Efi boot partition after trung to use an older Mac to install Linux Mint to an external disk.
  3. Extra Efi boot partitions on both Macs' home disks.
  4. An inability to shut down the existing system using the usual shutdown and reboot commands.
billyswong commented 3 months ago

61 and #63 looks like the same bug of this.

bluezclouds commented 4 weeks ago

After 9 years Ubiquity is still ignoring the user entry and installing the bootloader to the wrong disk.

I just installed Mint 22 on a USB SSD and ran into this issue yet again. While I was able to resolve the problem, new Linux users are being faced with an inscrutable grub prompt after installing Mint, even after selecting the correct disk for the bootloader.

If Ubiquity is going to ignore the "Device for bootloader installation" selection, please consider removing it from the Ubiquity UI.