'grub-install --force "(hd0)"' fails on trusty during installation

I've helped look into this for the OP.

It seems the part that is failing is:

# /usr/sbin/grub-install --force "(hd0)"
/usr/sbin/grub-bios-setup: error: disk `hd0' not found.

Which I thought was odd, so I created a device.map file:

# echo "(hd0) /dev/sda" > /boot/grub/device.map
# /usr/sbin/grub-install --force "(hd0)"
Installation finished. No error reported.

At the end of the grub-bios-setup help page it says:
DEVICE must be an OS device (e.g. /dev/sda).

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

The code in grub-installer does the following:

# Try to avoid using (hd0) as a boot device name. Something which can be
# turned into a stable by-id name is better.
default_bootdev_os="$($chroot $ROOT grub-mkdevicemap --no-floppy -m - | head -n1
 | cut -f2)"
if [ "$default_bootdev_os" ]; then
        default_bootdev="$($chroot $ROOT readlink -f "$default_bootdev_os")"
else
        default_bootdev="(hd0)"
fi

So it would be useful to know the output of the intermediate commands in your environment.

This problem has been tracked back to a use of 'bootloader --location mbr' in a kickstart file, which kickseed translates into:

   ks_preseed d-i grub-installer/bootdev string '(hd0)'

grub-installer then uses this string as-is as an argument to grub-install, without first ensuring the availability of a grub device map. Apparently with the recently rewritten grub-install, that doesn't work.

Not sure if this should be fixed in grub-install or grub-installer, but clearly somebody needs to take responsibility for creating the grub devicemap. :)

This is a regression caused by the fix for bug 1012629.

This bug was fixed in the package grub-installer - 1.78ubuntu19

---------------
grub-installer (1.78ubuntu19) trusty; urgency=medium

  * If grub-installer/bootdev was set to (hd0), override it to the OS device
    name for the first disk if possible (LP: #1292628).
 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 28 Mar 2014 13:11:31 +0000

As of today, grub-installer 2.00~beta2-9 works fine for me. :)

Just an update to this

I use kickstart as well, and was using an older cfg

bootloader --location=partition

This IS still failing because kickstart see it as (hd0, 1)

If i use 'mbr' it works just great