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[manzdagratiano <manjul.apratim@xxxxxxxxx>]

I was plagued by this bug as well while installing Lucid from a Live USB
- after the install when I rebooted with the USB key removed, the
machine gave me an error `error: symbol grub_puts_ not found' and
dropped me into grub-rescue mode. Seeking to fix grub from the Live USB,
I rebooted with the key inserted - however this time the machine booted
up, and instead of going into the live environment, it presented me with
my installed desktop environment! When I checked for where grub was
installed, it reported as being installed in /dev/sda1, which referred
to my USB drive; my hard drive was assigned to /dev/sdbY. Reinstalling
grub from this environment to my boot partition (I had separate boot and
root partitions) by mounting the boot partition as mentioned in the
Community Documentation (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2) as the
first method for fixing grub did nothing but transfer me to a grub>
prompt from grub-rescue> prompt on the next reboot (without the USB
key). Rebooting with the USB key inserted, and reinstalling grub by
running sudo grub-install /dev/sda (the second method for fixing grub on
the Community Documentation) installed grub on the root partition
instead of the boot partition, which caused problems on the next reboot
again. I was in no mood to sit there and debug this all day, so I rolled
back to Karmic.

I see two potential issues here - one that on a fresh install, the wrong
drive is selected, or at least the user is not asked for where he wants
grub to reside. The second is that upon running grub-install to a
/dev/sdX, the installer does not check for the presence of a separate
boot partition, but installs grub to the root partition.

I believe this is a regression from Karmic, which also employs grub2 and
there were no such issues in Karmic - as I verified after rolling back
to it. I am hesitant to try installing Lucid, which otherwise seemed to
be a solid release, until this issue is resolved.

-- 
[karmic] grub re-writes boot sector on wrong drive on fresh install
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/414996
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Status in Mythbuntu, Ubuntu derivative focused upon MythTV: Invalid
Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed

Bug description:
I attempted to install mythbuntu karmic/9.10 alpha 4 to a USB drive.   Using a laptop with an IDE drive containing Windows XP, I booted from the ISO image CD-ROM and went through the installation, selecting manual partitioning, and creating a single EXT4 root filesystem on a USB drive.   The installation proceeded through the complete install to the USB key until instructed to reboot.

I re-booted the laptop with the USB key inserted, and was presented with the message "No bootable partition in table".  Then, removing the USB key and booting from the laptop IDE drive (which should not have been touched by the mythbuntu install) I get the message "GRUB loading.  Welcome to GRUB!  Entering rescue mode... error: no such disk"  followed by the "grub rescue>" prompt.  

I examined the laptop hard drive with a partition editor, and the Windows partition is still intact....  but it looks like the boot sector has been re-written mistakenly.

Now I have two problems.....
1) how do I get Windows on my laptop to boot again....  I need my work data!
2) how do I make my mythbuntu USB front-end install bootable?