I'm trying out installing an oneiric prerelease on a machine that has a few local disks and is also currently attached to an empty disk array.
Grub-installer has a few problems in this setup:
- The first is that it doesn't work with device names that overflow past a single character identifier (/dev/sdXX instead of /dev/sdX).
- The other is it doesn't choose the correct device to install grub onto, and hence the machine doesn't boot after installing without installing grub manually. It tries /dev/sda, which is somewhere in the array rather than one of the local drives. I'd prefer to preseed 'd-i grub-installer/bootdev', but grub-installer doesn't check whether this has been set before deciding to use /dev/sda.
I've attached a patch that fixes both of these problems (at least for me), and results in a bootable system post-install.
Looks like I missed Bug 776633, which discusses one half of my problems, but not the inability to preseed the device to use.