Hi,

When installing on a UEFI system (Lenovo Ideapad Z585), amd64, (installer booted in UEFI mode, _I think_), installing grub fails with:

Executing grub-install dummy failed. This is a fatal error.

Extra information: The disk had a ~300M efiboot partition as the first partition, and the root partition was in an encrypted LVM volume, EXT4, and was 60GB in size.

Looking at the log on VT4 finds it is giving me

/usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: unknown filesystem.
Auto-detection of a filesystem of <my lvm root partition> failed.
Try with --recheck.

After a lot of research this post http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1935765&p=11757198#post11757198 suggested there's a "known bug" in grub with "large" root partitions. So, trying again, I used a 40GB root partition and lo and behold it worked.

I realize that this might be a "known bug" (perhaps with a fix), but I thought it best to alert you that this "known bug" is shipping on your currently available 7.1.0 netinst cd image and causing trouble (actually I used the "unofficial" with-firmware image, but I'm assuming it's "in sync" with the official 7.1.0 image as far as this is concerned).


robert.

Hi Robert,

If GRUB installed successfully, and you booted it, it would then need to
load the kernel image and initramfs into memory.  AFAIK it would be
unable to do that if those are inside of the encrypted LVM.  (The wheezy
version of GRUB2 can't itself open the encrypted LVM, and the kernel
would be not running yet).

It is mentioned in the install guide but many people seem to miss this
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch06s03.html.en#di-partition

It is unfortunate the user is not warned of the problem until the final
stages of the install process... (similar situation to Bug#717511).

I'm not familiar with UEFI, but if the 'efiboot' partition is what I
think it is, it need only be about 1MiB.  But you would also create for
example a 254MiB partition configured with a mountpoint of /boot.  It
must also be of a filesystem recognised by GRUB;  something simple like
ext2 should be ideal.

There can be issues with older BIOSes and partitions over a certain size
like you mention, but the configuration I described above fits
everything needed to boot the kernel within the first 256MiB of the disk.

Regards,

Hi Steven,

Sorry - (I knew there would be something I forgot to mention) - I did have a separate /boot partition of 300M. And when I tried to proceed without one, d-i did indeed warn me about that. So everything was fine as far as that's concerned.


robert.