Installing 10.04 to 2TB disk, does not boot

[Chan Chung Hang Christopher]

Dave Howorth wrote:
> 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

Right...so just saying that he installed stuff on the 2TB disks but they 
won't boot up but after he plugged in a 160 GB and used that for 
installation tells us what he did for his installation onto the 2TB 
disks like how he partitioned them, whether he used raid and so on? I 
had to ask you know.


> 
>> - 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.

The installer needs to know to check for the existence of a bios_boot 
gpt partition if the disk is GPT partitioned and warn/alert if not 
present and to stuff grub initial bootcode only into the MBR. I'd say 
the installer pretty much needs to recognize the fact that the disk is 
using GPT partitions and the MSDOS/PCDOS scheme of things.


> 
>>>> 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!

Oops, my mistake, I either mixed that up with something else that I 
currently cannot find (figures) or my brain substituted 2009 for 2007 
when I read it. Here is a report of someone having to work around 
debian-installer. Maybe that conditioned my mind.

http://www.mail-archive.com/grub-devel@gnu.org/msg12109.html


> 
>> 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 :)
> 

Well, like others have said here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/partman-base/+bug/506670

the installer does need a bit of awareness instead of just calling grub2 
install.