Ubuntu – Quantal analyzes the HD in any boot

In the 13.04 beta, I downloaded you can fix the underlying cause for this problem by manually partitioning the drive you are installing too, to add a EFI partition at the very beginning of the drive. This makes the installer realize that it needs to install grub-efi there.

Let's first off, boot your system from the Rescue GRUB prompt.

Reboot the system, and boot into the correct drive for your install with Ubuntu. You should be presented with a grub rescue> prompt. From there type the following to boot into the system.

1. set prefix=/boot/grub/
2. insmod normal This should turn your prompt's text from grey to white.
3. insmod linux.
4. linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sdXY ro Replace X and Y with letter and number of your drive.
5. initrd /initrd.img
6. boot.

This should start the boot process for your system.

Now that your are in your system, it's time to fix the underlying problem. For me that problem is that it can't find the /grub/i386-pc/ folder. The following should have you booting your system without having to rescue it.

1. Press Alt + F2.
2. Type gksudo nautilus and press Enter.
3. Type your password.
4. Copy your /boot/grub/ directory into your / root directory.

The end result should be that you still have a /boot/ and now you have a /grub/ directory. Reboot the system and it should work. If it does not work, well, you're back at square one.

It seems to me that the under the following circumstances that GRUB will fail to boot the system right after installation of Ubuntu 12.10 if the following conditions are TRUE.

1. You have an UEFI based system.
2. During the install process you delete the entire disk that you are installing too.
3. After deleting the entire disk, you do not make a new partition, but simply click next and let the installer do it's magic.

This seems to me where the problem stems from, because the installer does not take into account that it needs to make a EFI partition for the /boot/ directory, but GRUB does not get this memo at all and as far as it knows the /boot/ directory is on it's own partition. From there GRUB tries to read /grub/ but it can't because it's nested in /boot/grub.

That's my take on it anyway. Thankfully my system now boots without me having to do some crazy kung-fo on the grub command line.

Did you try the firmware update v5865?

http://support.wd.com/product/download.asp?groupid=2301&sid=222&lang=en