Comment 19 for bug 260001

I resolved the issue, as well, but I'm not sure how.

Originally, my system configuration was a triple boot environment (Vista, XP, Ubuntu 7.10), but my XP partition went corrupted, so I bought a new hard drive to install XP and Ubuntu 8.10 on.

In anticipation of how my hard drive was going to be laid out, I created two NTFS partitions on my new hard drive (80 GB apiece) and installed Windows XP on the first partition because Intrepid hadn't been released yet.

I tried to install Hardy on the second NTFS partition (formatting it to ext3) but Hardy failed during the installation process, saying that there had been an error in setting up grub. When Intrepid was released, it produced the same error during install.

Having had some experience setting up grub during a previous grub failure, I tried setting up grub manually; however, grub consistently was unable to find /boot/grub/stage1 (producing errors 15 and 17). Even with a grub boot disk, grub refused to set up a bootloader.

I noticed an error documented in some forums regarding 128-byte/256-byte inode compatibility with grub. I formatted the partition using 128-byte inodes and retried installing Ubuntu without reformatting the partition. Ubuntu failed again due to the same grub error.

The last thing I tried was letting Ubiquity re-partition the partition that I had originally intended to install on (splitting the partition in the process, creating 77 and 3 Gb partitions). When it finished setup, it installed grub on the disk without any problem.

I don't know what might have caused this, but I hope it's helpful.