Bug#712907: grub-installer: No longer installs automatically on a normal machine with one hard drive
> Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> (2014-09-21):
> > <URL: https://jenkins.debian.net/job/g-i-installation_debian-edu_jessie_standalone/12/artifact/results/snapshot_004900.png >
> >
> > This is very bad from a usability point of view, as normal people are
> > not expected to know device paths.
I got feedback from one of these normal people doing a wheezy install.
The dialog instructed him to use /dev/sda if he wants to install GRUB
to the first hard disk. But that was wrong! Since this was a USB-
booted install, /dev/sda was the install media and /dev/sdb his first
hard disk.
grub-installer actually pre-filled the dialog with "/dev/sdb", meaning
the code to not-install to USB media and guess something else, had
worked correctly in this instance.
There's a possibility that this has led to install reports implicating
grub-installer, in which the code perhaps worked as intended but it was
only the user's responses to wrong information that caused an issue.
On 14:22, Cyril Brulebois wrote:
> Well, I don't know anything about Debian Edu, but I'm pretty sure
> there's another prompt before that in non-Edu, where devices are
> listed, and where users can pick from.
Yes, in jessie d-i there's now a preceding dialog that shows a list
of devices and their identity. I think this is a great solution to
the above problem.
The problem here, affecting Debian Edu and AFAIK any preseed install,
was that the new dialog defaults to 'Enter device manually' and the
automated installer chooses that option. Therefore we see the original
manual input dialog.
During manual installs, *sometimes* something other than 'Enter
device manually' is selected by default. We just need to figure out
why that didn't happen in Petter's situation.
Was /dev/sda the first hard disk in this case? Does grub-mkdevicemap
in /target call it (hd0)? What is the full conents of /proc/partitions?
grub-installer can log extra stuff to syslog if you uncomment some of
the debug options at the top of the file.
(We really should have jenkins.d.o redirect syslog to the virtual serial
port, log it to a file and include it among the build artifacts. I
think some of the Jenkins jobs do that, but not this one).
Regards,
--
Steven Chamberlain
steven@pyro.eu.org
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