Home / ubuntu / Questions / 207972
Accepted
Hrish
Asked: 2012-10-29 20:12:07 +0800 CST

I have a ESXi 5.0 installed and when I am Installing Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS it is giving an error saying grub installation failed?

  • 772

I have ESXi 5.0 installed and when I am installing Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS (32 bit) it is giving an error saying grub installation failed

Here is a screenshot of the error:

ESXI grub install

  1. I have other Ubuntu servers running fine on this esxi server, so I don't think problem is with ESXi.
  2. I have 32 GB of ram spare on this ESXi and have given 2 GB of RAM to this 12.0 LTS VM.
  3. I have allocated 2 processor cores.
  4. I have tried supplying different ISO Image to this VM as I thought the 1st image that I downloaded has errors. But that's definitely not the case as all 3 different ISO images that I downloaded of Ubuntu server 12.04 LTS (32-bit) can't be corrupt!
  5. Just to make sure that the Image does not have problem I used that Image to install it for testing on stand alone system. it works fine there!
  6. This is a production ESXi server which I can't play with, however I can play with the Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS (32-Bit) VM that we have created on that ESXi.

Here is more information for another attempt:

  • For this install, I've given 1 core of the XENON processor, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of HHD.

  • I have used LVM with the automatic partition manager (where I do not have to create partitions manually).

  • I do not have any working Ubuntu 12.04 LTS image installed anywhere. :(

  • I tried installing Ubuntu 12.10 on the same VM which worked well, however that is of no use to me as I need Ubuntu 12.04 LTS only for testing purpose.

Please let me know if you need any further details. 

I need help on this as soon as possible, as the go live date of this server is really close.

installation

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I got exactly the same GRUB boot loader error message when trying to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server under VMware Player 4.0.3.

    I then went back to basic installation and at a certain moment you are asked which kernel you are going to use. I chose the second option, i.e. linux-virtual and then it proceeded to reinstall basic services as well as grub and Ubuntu login screen came up.

    I keep using 4.0.3 since it seems to be the last version containing vmnetcfg.exe in its cab folder which can be extracted with /e switch, as VMware stopped including this in the newer versions. VMware Player 5 certainly does not have it.

    Of course you can opt to use VMware Workstation 8.0 or 9.0 if the money were not the issue.

    • 4

  2. Did you set up your partitions manually? I had a similar issue running on VirtualBox, and I had to go through the manual partition setup, which allowed me to set the primary partition's bootable flag to Y (why that isn't the default, I'm not sure). Then I selected to reinstall the Linux file system and was later prompted to select a Linux kernel to boot to, followed by a prompt to install GRUB, which succeeded. The auto-setup appears to skip one or more of the above steps. FWIW, the Linux kernel I selected was the linux-virtual kernel -- not being too knowledgeable on the difference between that and the generic-pae version, I can at least say it booted up and appears to be functioning well.

    • 0

  3. RAM and processor should be irrelevant, as this is a hard disk (grub) message. Can you not re-use an image from a previously working install? If you have given 20G of disk space for the instance, I would think that is sufficient.

    If all else fails, try cloning an existing, running image and then customize it. Be careful to change IP addresses before you attempt to bring it up in this case.

    Since you have been using LVM, I would try without it at least as a test.

    • 0