When I attempt to install Ubuntu 17 for a dual-boot alongside Windows 10 under a UEFI regime, everything goes well at first (recognizes the windows partition etc.).
Then files are copied over until the installation gets to "update-grub" at which point it hangs (or more precisely, slows down to a crawl). I let it run for 10 hours before killing it.
Opening up the dialog box reveals a slow trickle of errors, about one every 2-3 minutes.
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On this same machine, I was able to successfully install Ubuntu alongside Windows previously, so I know there is hope. I initially had a FAT partition shared between them on the SATA (non-SSD) drive /dev/sda, but had inadvertently allocated only half the drive, leaving the other half un-allocated. I tried expanding the partition from the windows disk management tool, but it refused to let me (grayed out option). I found another partition management tool that allowed me to modify this partition size to reclaim the additional space. This broke Ubuntu but I was still able to access Windows.
No worries I thought, it would be easy enough to retrace steps and I hadn't invested too much time installing and personalizing Ubuntu yet. But this time, the installation stalled in a place where it hadn't before.
The boot partition is on the SSD (/dev/nvme0n1) while the partition I modified was on the SATA drive (/dev/sda). So I don't think it was the modification of /dev/sda that broke anything per se.
But there are now 2 or 3 boot partitions from botched install attempts, and the only way I know to distinguish between them is their size, so I'm not feeling confident enough to delete them without knowing what they are exactly, but this could be interfering with the install processes, and so making educated guesses at which partitions to delete will likely be my last resort if all else fails.
Thanks in advance! ~willem
