Bug in Ubuntu 8.04 doesn't let it boot right after installation ..

This rather very serious bug prevents a freshly installed Ubuntu 8.04 system from booting. If there is no other OS installed, then it is almost impossible to recover from this situation.

After getting my new desktop home, I started with the installation right away. I have a SATA hard disk and an old PATA/IDE hard disk and I connected both. In the BIOS, I set the SATA hard drive first in the boot order. The installation was smooth and finished in less than 20 mins. However, when I rebooted, the system hanged with a single cursor blinking indefinitely. At first, I couldn't understand what would have gone wrong. I booted into the Live CD and configured the network and started searching for solutions. As soon as I saw I understood the problem. Mixing SATA and IDE hard disks have always caused problem with Linux. Grub installer had to install the boot loader to the SATA disk on which I installed the system and which is first in the boot order as well. But it installed the same onto the second IDE disk.

I tried changing the boot order, in BIOS, of these two disks, but in vain. I had seen references in some forums that this worked however. The only option left for me was to remove the IDE hard disk. I was fortunate as I had an external IDE disk carrier which I can always plug in through USB port. But this bug is still open in launchpad. I hope they will soon resolve this problem.