Further testing, I found out that the grub installation failure seems to be related to whether there is an EFI System Partition (ESP) or not.
I did the following change to my VirtualBox setup to manually create an ESP: - Shrink the single partition on my virtual HD with GParted so I get 512MB free space at the end of the disk - Create an additional primary FAT32 partition with 512MB size, mark it as ESP (with cfdisk) So I have the following partition layout: /dev/sda1: primary partion, size ~9,5GB, ext4 /dev/sda2: primary partition, size 512MB, fat32, marked as ESP With this partition layout and selecting /dev/sda1 as root (marked for formating) the installation will complete successfully without an error regarding grub installation, and the installed system boots fine. So it seems that this bug happens if there is no ESP on the system - even if the system doesn't support UEFI at all and thus doesn't need an ESP. ** Summary changed: - Installation of Ubuntu Groovy with manual partitioning fails on 'grub-install /dev/sda' + Installation of Ubuntu Groovy with manual partitioning without an EFI System Partition fails on 'grub-install /dev/sda' even on non-UEFI systems -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1893964 Title: Installation of Ubuntu Groovy with manual partitioning without an EFI System Partition fails on 'grub-install /dev/sda' even on non-UEFI systems To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1893964/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
