Flight7 overwrites MBR of the active partition!

[greensh]

This is a big problem and I didn't see any option to select another partition to install GRUB onto.

My SATA drive was detected as sda and it's MBR was setup to boot WinXP. It also contained a special encryption screen. Well, the LiveCD installer somehow stomped over this with GRUB and now there's probably no easy way to recover the sda MBR, the first 446 bytes of the drive, leaving me no way to boot WinXP at all. I even tried using the 'C' option in GRUB at startup to manually try booting sda1, but only Kubuntu boots.

There needs to be an installer option allowing to install the bootsector to the sda2 or another, then, you can writeout the sda2 for example using dd into a file and copy that to a flash drive and to sda1 (in this case mine was NTFS), then setup a proper dual boot using the WinXP boot loader.

Booting Windows with GRUB is NOT the recommended way to dual boot, because then the Windows recovery disks will stumble over this. The above is the best way and I've done that for 4 years with LILO.

[askrieger]

Re: Flight7 overwrites MBR of the active partition!

I don't think that the behavior you noted is specific to Dapper Flight 7. I believe it's the default behavior for GRUB to install itself on the MBR. However, I vaguely remember (6 months ago) being given a choice between the MBR and and a user specified location. It would be a significant bug if this choice is no longer presented.

[Fenyx]

Re: Flight7 overwrites MBR of the active partition!

Probably the choice isn't present in the Desktop CD (a.k.a Live CD installer). I'll go check it out once I finish downloading F7.

[Bloody100]

Re: Flight7 overwrites MBR of the active partition!

I've just installed kubuntu from dvd-6.06, and i was facing the same problem:

The MBR is overwritten without any question!!

Imagine the following situation:

I've got about 25 partitions on 2 harddisks, for one Windows and up to 6 parallel
Linux distros, and i've already created a wonderful Grub menu to boot from my
Gentoo distro.

Now kubuntu just claims that i want to overwrite my customized grub with the one
from kubuntu. How can this be assumed ?

For a more complete picture about my situation: I have choisen to install kubuntu
on the second harddisk which is the one i'm booting from (i told the BIOS to do so),
but not the one where Windows is installed. I can be lucky that kubuntu has overwritten
my grub bootloader and not the original windows bootloader on the first harddisk which
i want to keep intact under all circumstances. Now if i had chosen the first harddisk for
kubuntu's root partition, my windows bootloader would have been erased without any
warning (and i'd never see kubuntus grub loader because the BIOS will boot from the
second harddisk), and when i uninstall my Linux distros, i will not be able to boot my
windows anymore because there's no more grub config on the (former) kubuntu
installation.

Edit: in addition, the kubuntu installer has not recognized all of my Linux installations
(to add them to the grub.conf), like e.g. my backup system (knoppix) which i use to
backup my windows and the other (important) Linux systems on my box. Beyond that,
the memtest entry was also missing. Surprisingly, the correct parameters for my
Gentoo distro have been recognized correctly.

Please, never assume harddisk operations if you're not 101% sure what you're doing.
Critical operations like installing Grub, partitioning or formatting harddisks must ALWAYS
be asked for confirmation. Even MEPIS linux with the worlds simplest installer can't
go around telling these questions. Even if that means that the unexperienced user must
be faced with another question, but these two things (Grub + partitions) must always
be asked for confirmation. I'm aware of the fact that ubuntu tries to be easy but
unfortunately, this goes too far..

Edit: i just found that the kubuntu installer adds "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-23-amd64-generic"
as kernel even if there's a /vmlinuz link in the kubuntu root directory. Shouldn't this one
be used instead?

Cheers..

[askrieger]

Re: Flight7 overwrites MBR of the active partition!

Bloody100: It's probably too late and unneccesary for you, but I seem to recall that Tux magazine had an article a few months back about generating grub menus for tricky multiple distribution boot scenarios.

[Bloody100]

Re: Flight7 overwrites MBR of the active partition!

Well, i personally have no problems now because i simply re-installed my old grub bootloader,
and that's it. But the trouble is that other (unexperienced) users might see this differently.

If i was a Linux distro maintainer, i'd find it unjustifiable not to warn the user at the only right place,
namely the installer window. What if a novice user didn't read about the ubuntu 'dangers' before
trying to install the system?

That appears to me like Gentoo Linux - no research, no fun. I stay with my humble opinion ... such
critical operations must under all circumstances be confirmed at the right place. Novice users usually
rely on the expertise of the software developers in question and usually dislike further research, right...

[Fenyx]

Re: Flight7 overwrites MBR of the active partition!

Also, if you look read carefully the download pages, you will see these texts:

Alternate install CD
The alternate install CD allows you to perform certain specialist installations of Kubuntu. It provides for the following situations:
- setting up automated deployments;
- upgrading from older installations without network access;
- LVM and/or RAID partitioning;
- installing GRUB to a location other than the Master Boot Record;
- installs on systems with less than about 192MB of RAM.

As you can see, it is the Alternate Install CD that does what most intermediate/advanced users want.

I've said this before and I'll say it again. The Desktop CD installer is only meant for a very basic desktop installation, nothing more. It's targeted for very new users who have very little experience with Linux, users who wouldn't want to deal much with partitioning and GRUB. That's why it overrides the MBR by default, so newbies won't have to get a headache about them.

[Bloody100]

Re: Flight7 overwrites MBR of the active partition!

Call me squeamish if you like, but...

There is only ONE version of the DVD (yes the DVD and not the CD), and what if one is using a
kubuntu copy from a pal, neighbor (or someone) without even visiting kubuntu.com once before installing the system?

You seem to assume that every kubuntu user must necessarily have downloaded his/her copy
directly from your website?

And... what if a user has installed windows only (one harddisk), then tries kubuntu, isn't satisfied,
uninstalls it and then wants to boot good ole' Windows again? Surprise, surprise...
Alright, in this case there 's no way around installing grub, but how can you be so sure that
the kubuntu installer always does the right thing even for the novicest of novice user?

Your turn... *G*

[Fenyx]

Re: Flight7 overwrites MBR of the active partition!

Oh yes, the DVD will be a problem. Is there no option on the DVD to use a text-based install? I hope it has.

From my website? I have no website. I was quoting from the Kubuntu/Ubuntu download sites/mirrors.

Anyway, the Ubiquity installer (the name of the installer program on the Desktop CD) is just new. Maybe they will add features in the future. Maybe they'll remove it. I don't know. I was just sharing what I do know.

[Bloody100]

Re: Flight7 overwrites MBR of the active partition!

Of course i meant "an ubuntu website" in general (kubuntu.com, kubuntu.de or whatever),
regarding to any kinda official download source, and not particularly "your website", whatever
this is. No offense meant...

I just tried to say how difficult it can turn out to make 101% sure that a critical task like an MBR
installer is always doing the right thing under all imaginable circumstances, likely or unlikely.

Edit: there's an option in the DVD bootsplash named "install in text mode", perhaps this option
contains a more detaild installation procedure. However, frankly i'd not expect a novice user to
choose this one..

Cheers...

[Fenyx]

Re: Flight7 overwrites MBR of the active partition!

No offense taken. But you could have said "kubuntu's" rather than "your". It would have been less confusing, since you were replying to my post.

The thing is, the desktop CD is really meant for newbies. Newbies wouldn't know where/how to put GRUB somewhere else. And newbies wouldn't remove an existing Linux installation by themselves, without asking for help somewhere. It's not like they can uninstall a Linux distro as simply as they could uninstall an application, right?

Anyway, the installer still has a long way to go to becoming useful for everyone. But for newbies, specially those that don't have any other OS installed on the drive, can surely use it without much problem, and without much headache.