Installer crashes / Grub problems with 6.06

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I just (tried) to install Kubuntu Dapper (6.06) from the Live/Install CD onto a clean partition.

The install itself went fine, all files copied, etc etc. However, GRUB refused to get installed, causing the installer program to crash. I was left with a non-linux-bootable system.

I tried the following:
Boot into rescue mode: Nada (see http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202184 ). No rescue mode, means no rescue possible.

Boot into the live system and try to install Lilo (which I know how to hand configure, and it works): nada. The live+install CD, (probably in an attempt to make it compact) does NOT have a regular deb repository, so there are no lilo*.deb files to hand-install from. They have a system image under /casper/filesystem.squashfs, but that does not have lilo installed either - only grub.

Try to get lilo-*.deb from the internet: Can't do that either, cos I only have wireless (which is supported only via ndiswrapper - good luck getting that working )

Anyone has any bright ideas (other than installing 5.10 and doing a dist-upgrade), e.g. how exactly to hand-configure Grub? I will RTFM of course, but some quick pointers would be more than welcome! Please remember I only have a chroot to work in

My hard disk partitions are as follows:

 hda1 6.35 GB - NTFS, C: on WinXP
 hda5 1.95 GB - FAT32, D: on WinXP
 hda6 40  GB - NTFS, E: on WinXP
 hda7 7  GB - Linux, XFS
 hda8 55  MB - Linux, Swap Space

Although I love (K)Ubuntu for the last two versions, this is one major problem I've always had with Ubuntu: Whenever I install the system, I run into the CHS/LBA problem that causes both Grub and Lilo to fail (lilo can be overridden with a -P or some such option, what is it for grub?)

Especially bad points on the new installer, which doesn't give me the option to install Lilo at all!

Any help appreciated!

Thanks,
Hrishikesh

[vmifox]

Re: Installer crashes / Grub problems with 6.06

Hi,
I'm relatively new to Kubuntu, but I've been using Linux (mostly Gentoo) for at least 4 years.  It's my understanding that when using GRUB, you must use the ext2 filesystem.  XFS is a great filesystem (I have had it on one of my partitions for at least 6 months), but to use it, you will have to create a separate boot partition that is formatted with ext2 (ext3 might be possible, but ext2 is guaranteed to work).  I made this mistake as well one of the first few times I tried the Kubuntu 6.06 betas.  When I realized what I did and reinstalled, everything worked fine.

If you want to use XFS, I would recommend using a UPS as well. XFS does a fair amount of caching and having a power failure at the wrong time could corrupt the filesystem.

I hope this helps.