Hello,

I'm writing a script to install Debian automatically on a memory card.
During the install, the memory card is in a USB card reader connected to a
PC, typically the device for the card is /dev/sdb and the system partition
is on /dev/sdb1.
Once the system is installed, the idea is to put the card in anotehr machine
and to boot on it. At boot time, though, the device corresponding to the
memory card will be /dev/hda and the system partition will thus be on
/dev/hda1.
(it is not possible to perform the installation with the card in the computer
where it will be booted later for some reasons too long to explain here).

Anyway: it is in this context that I tried to use some preseeding to
automate grub's installation.
Ideally I'd like to be able to do the preseeding in a way that allows the
package's postinst script to install grub correctly. As a fallback, it would
be okay that the postinst script does not install grub on the MBR and that
this is done by a command executed by my script after the package has been
installed.

So far, though, nothing worked and I have the problem that although I
preseed some settings before the package is installed, questions are still
asked to the user interactively, which is precisely the behaviour I'd like to
avoid.

For the preseeding I tried things like:
grub-pc grub-pc/install_devices multiselect
grub-pc grub-pc/install_devices seen    true
grub-pc grub-pc/install_devices_empty   boolean true
grub-pc grub-pc/install_devices_empty   seen    true
grub-pc grub-pc/mixed_legacy_and_grub2  boolean false
grub-pc grub-pc/mixed_legacy_and_grub2  seen    true
But that does not work, the questions are still asked as if nothing had been
preseeded.

I also tried:
grub-pc grub-pc/install_devices multiselect     /dev/sdb
but the results are not more satisfactory: postinst still goes interactive.

So, any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm reporting this as a bug
because I find it very strange that the preseeding seems to be ignored and
the questions seem to be asked in an unconditional way.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

PS: there is also the problem that update-grub includes options to bot on
the systems present on the host OS but these will not be present on the real
machine so any advice on how to cleanly proceed so that these alternatives
are not included would also be greatly appreciated.