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

[Colin Law]

On 6 June 2015 at 12:11, Barry Drake <ubuntu-advertising at gmx.com> wrote:
> On 06/06/15 11:50, Colin Law wrote:
>
>> You did not answer the other questions on my previous post.  Apologies
>> if that is because you still have to sort out the answers.  I thought
>> I had better say in case you had missed the questions.
>
>
> Sorry Colin .....  I saw all the questions - the fact is I did not boot from
> the grub menu which was normally used to boot in the manner stated.  During
> installation, I had booted directly from the DVD.  Please ask me which part
> of the question I had not answered.  The BIOS boot setting was set to sda,
> but this was not used when booting the live DVD for installation.
>
> During the running of the live DVD, neither sda nor sdb were mounted until
> the installer mounted sdb and re-formatted it.

Copying from my previous post (with minor adjustments for clarification):
>  I was
> installing to sdb, following all the defaults for reformatting and using the
> entire drive.  Mint was (is) on sda.  On completing the installation, sdb
> would not boot, although it had what looked like a valid boot installation
> on a 510 Mb FAT32 boot partition.  Nor had sda had an update to grub.  I
> really can't see why it had messed up what it ought to have done with the
> boot/grub process on sdb.

How were you trying to boot off sdb (when it "would not boot")?

What exactly happened when you tried?

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.

>
> Neither can I see why it handled the re-installation differently. Basically,
> the installer doesn't seem to be able to handle systems with more than one
> bootable hard drive very intuitively.  The second installation did not make
> sdb bootable at all!  It re-installed grub to sda, and did an update-grub to
> that drive.  I had to install grub manually to sdb and do an update to that
> drive to make it bootable.  I find it most curious!

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.

Colin