#1137079 grub-installer: The menu asking which drive to use for GRUB installation is broken

Package:
src:grub-installer
Source:
src:grub-installer
Submitter:
Bergamot
Date:
2026-06-27 06:09:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#1137079#5
Date:
2026-05-19 08:48:43 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

On bookworm, i386, the installer menu that asks which drive to use for GRUB installation is misbehaving. This was happening on 12.13; I've downloaded a fresh DVD image of 12.14 yesterday to test and it's still an issue.
	1) Go through the installation as usual. In all of my test cases, I've created a new partition table with a single ext4 root partition. It doesn't seem to matter whether you check "bootable flag", or use network mirrors or not.
	2) When the installer asks whether you want to install GRUB to your primary drive, select No.
	3) Select the desired disk in the list presented.
	4) It will run "grub-install " (without any drive argument), effectively installing it nowhere. The resulting system is unbootable.
If you do agree to install on your primary drive, it shows the drive list anyway, even if you only have one drive, even if it only has one partition, but this time selecting a drive will actually install GRUB.
If, instead of choosing the disk from the list, you select "Enter drive manually", that will work correctly too.
I've tested this on real hardware (Intel D865GLC) with several USB pen drives, a SATA hard disk drive, as well on VirtualBox with one virtual SATA DVD drive and one virtual SATA HDD.
#1137079#10
Date:
2026-05-19 10:04:05 UTC
From:
To:
This is a known issue, see bugs #1035096 and #1058638. It was fixed in
grub-installer 1.207 for trixie.
This part of the code is rather obscure and I am not sure what "primary
drive" means here.
#1137079#15
Date:
2026-05-20 00:47:11 UTC
From:
To:
Thanks for the reply, I see, wishing the fix gets backported here as bookworm is the last release to officially support 32-bit x86 and people may still need to use that :)
I haven't looked at the source but the very wording of that prompt confuses me too, I always answer negatively just to be safe...
#1137079#20
Date:
2026-05-20 05:29:46 UTC
From:
To:
d-i maintainers, would your consider backporting commit 78376e99d6 ("Fix
wrong or empty bootdev value for grub-pc") to bookworm for the next (and
probably last) point release ?
#1137079#25
Date:
2026-06-27 06:07:11 UTC
From:
To:
No reply and the last point release is near, so I'm afraid bookworm
users will still have to make sure to select "Install GRUB to your
primary drive" or "Enter drive manually" as a workaround.