[Bug 1487365] Re: Ubuntu14.04 .3 RAID installation fails on firestone

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

Any idea which distro you saw supported this? Upstream grub explicitly
does not support diskfilter writes (in other words, writing directly to
/dev/md* devices, LVM, etc), but rather expects one to write to the
underlying device, because there are just too many different cases in
which writing directly to the top layer might break things.

My workaround (I'm still testing) would be to have grub-installer pick
the underlying devices to install to.

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Title:
  Ubuntu14.04 .3 RAID installation fails on firestone

Status in debian-installer package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Problem Description
  =======================
  Installation goes smoothly, until it reaches grub installation, and fails with fatal error there.
   
  Machine Type = pio-firestone 
   
  ---boot type---
  QEMU direct boot kernel/initrd
   
  ---Kernel cmdline used to launch install---
  kexec -l /root/vmlinux.venkat -i /root/initrd.gz.venkat
  kexec -e

  == Comment: # - Venkat R. B <venkatb3 at in.ibm.com> - 2015-08-14 08:08:41 ==
  I am trying to install Ubuntu14.04 on the firestone machine on a RAID1 array, configured with software raid.
  Installation goes on smoothly till its reaches grub loader and fails. Below I have pasted the error.

               ?? [!!] Install the GRUB boot loader on a hard disk ??
    ????????????                                                    ? ?????????
    ?          ?        Unable to install GRUB in /dev/md0p1        ?         ?
    ?          ? Executing 'grub-install /dev/md0p1' failed.        ?         ?
    ?          ?                                                    ?         ?
    ? Running "? This is a fatal error.                             ?         ?
    ?          ?                                                    ?         ?
    ????????????     <Go Back>                       <Continue>     ? ?????????
               ?                                                    ?
               ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????

  == Comment: # - Mauricio Faria De Oliveira <mauricfo at br.ibm.com> - 2015-08-20 09:31:11 ==
  grub-installer pieces from syslog

  Aug 19 11:07:43 grub-installer: info: Installing grub on '/dev/md0p1'
  Aug 19 11:07:43 grub-installer: info: grub-install does not support --no-floppy
  Aug 19 11:07:43 grub-installer: info: Running chroot /target grub-install  --force "/dev/md0p1"
  Aug 19 11:07:43 grub-installer: Installing for powerpc-ieee1275 platform.
  Aug 19 11:08:01 grub-installer: grub-install: error: failed to copy Grub to the PReP partition.
  Aug 19 11:08:01 grub-installer: error: Running 'grub-install  --force "/dev/md0p1"' failed.

  and the "error:" message 'failed to copy Grub to the PReP partition.'
  is not generated by the grub-installer script itself [1], so probably
  coming down from grub2.

  I'd suggest to either involve our grub2 guy (not sure if available),
  or mirroring to Canonical.


  [1] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/trusty/grub-
  installer/trusty-updates/view/head:/grub-installer

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