Cards on the table - Ubuntu is one of my least favourite distros. Yet my favourite distro, Mint is a derivative. However, I decided to give Ubuntu a try simply to experience the Unity desktop and see if I could learn to love it!

My machines are multi-boot and for reasons that are not up for discussion here, Grub is installed in the root partition of each distro. This rarely causes any difficulty (unless Ubiquity is involved). Anyway, installation seemed to go ok until the very end when it popped up a fatal warning that it could not install Grub to the designated partition - sdb13 (sdb because it sees its own usb stick as sda),

Is there a way/utility to force Grub where I want it for this install?

[I'm not a Ubuntu forum member but looked at registering only to discover that to do so looks unnecessarily complicated now - especially as Ubuntu is not yet installed on any machine!]

Hi there,

same here. I liked Ubuntu for some time - until 10.10 (maverick). After that, they switched to Unity or Gnome3, neither of which I really liked. So I stuck with 10.10 until support expired, and then discovered Linux Mint featuring the MATE desktop (a fork of Gnome2), which is my favorite now. However, getting tired of re-installign the system every few months when support expires, I'm seriously thinking about switching to LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).

Well, I tried, but I couldn't.

That means you must have another "master" boot manager in the MBR. Weird, but that's up to you.

There you have me. I never bothered to ask but now I finally do: What the hell is Ubiquity?

Wow, you seem to have an awful lot of partitions there! Have you ever thought of installing your abundance of distros in virtual machines?
Anyway: What's the problem? What is the actual error condition?

That should do the trick ...

[X] Doc CPU

DOC CPU: Ubiquity is the Ubuntu installer.
Codger. Boot the Ubuntu CD, Try without installing, open a terminal and type each of the commands below consecutively. Make sure the partition you want is actually sdb13, can't check that too often.

If that doesn't work, it gets a little more complicated. Again boot thee Ubuntu CD and from a terminal run each of these commands:

Of course, you will still need to configure whatever bootloader you have in the mbr to boot Ubuntu by placing an entry in the proper file.

Thanks for your replies.

Doc CPU

and

I did indicate "not for discussion" but anyway not wierd to me. My Windows installs are permanent and accessed via EasyBCD which also links to Grub in each Linux partition. There are also several ntfs/fat32 data partitions which are accessible to all.

Answered by yancek

Described in OP. Subsequently it wants to report the error then has the impertinence to tell me it won't because it's not cosher despite being downloaded from their own site (and md5 checked)!

If only it were that simple - especially viewing yanceks suggestion!

yancek

Its actually a liveusb not cd but that shouldn't make any difference.

Presumably you're both suggesting doing that from terminal in Ubuntu live session? (BTW trying the initial install from live session results in bombing to text screen then scrambled graphics - though live session itself ok - so have to select Install option).

Could it be done from one of the other Linux installs - perhaps Mint 13 which is based on Ubuntu 12.04?

Anyway, it may be irrelevant as the subsequent live session of Unity experience was awful. Something like a very bad Android implementation without the touch screen! (I recently saw a better attempt at that sort interface - was it Mandriva 2011 or Mageia or some such?). Never having been convinced by Ubuntu but this is truly dreadful - give me Mint, PCLos or Mepis every time.

[PS DocCPU - Mint 13 is LTS 'til 2017 and even Mepis 8 (and earlier) is still supported. PCLos is a rolling release so get as you want it quickly or keep updating]

EDIT Just added Cinnamon to Mint13 Xfce (+Compiz) and guess what - it also installs Unity! So none of this matters...!

Yes that should work and they should have the same Grub version. If you can't get the basics to work on the Live CD/flash, it probably will not do well installed.

Thanks - I'll bear it in mind as a fall back position...!