Bug#276244: Grub fails on install of Debian Testing

[ketil vestby]

Package: Grub / Debian installer

Version: Debian Installer, floppy-install prerelease marked as Working, 
downloaded oct. 8. 2004 (from 
http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/floppy/)

Package: Grub or Debian Installer

Hardware:
- Four Western Digital Venturis P1,  100-133 Hz,
  harddisks betwen 13 and 160 GiB (one harddisk on each),
  64 MB RAM on each computer
- One TCI 80486 dx2
  one 80 GiB harddisk
  32 MB RAM

Harddisks partitioned as:
  - /boot (~30 MB at the beginning, marked as active bootpartition),
  - swap (~300 MB directly after the boot partition),
  - / (all remaining space)

What I do to demonstrate the problem:
- Install Debian, by fetching the distribution over web.
  I am using the plain installer (pressing [enter] at the initial 
installation screen).
- Reboot the computer after the initial packages have been successfully 
installed

Expected behaviour:
- A Grub - menu, with boot option

Observed behaviour:
- BIOS screen with initial data, and below is the following message:
  **********
  * GRUB Loading stage1.5.
  *
  * GRUB loading, please wait...
  * Error 18
  **********

Suggested fix: Either replace GRUB with LiLO from the plain installer, 
or fix the problem with GRUB and large harddisks.
All computers are running Debian Testing perfectly if I use the old 
installer from Woody, and keeps LiLO as bootloader when upgrading to 
Testing. A quick Google using the keywords 'Grub "error 18"' gave me 547 
different hits at the time of this report (okt. 12. 2004), so personally 
I think this might be a serious problem with GRUB.