utopic upgrade lost the 'ubuntu' EFI variable

[Nick Moffitt]

My upgrade from trusty to utopic on my thinkpad X240 with a LUKS-encrypted / went smoothly enough. The only oddity was a period when I had to click into the terminal details and hit enter for it to complete. I'm not entirely sure what was waiting for input or if it is relevant, but when I rebooted I found myself without the 'ubuntu' entry in the EFI variables.

I didn't realise this at first, and the Canonical Technical Support folks advised me to use this tool: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair which made the problem worse (It did not fix the EFI problem, and removed dm-crypt.ko from my initrd). I had to run efibootmgr to put it back, and start from an old kernel that had an unmolested initrd.

I've restored boot functionality on my laptop now, but I'm curious what caused it to happen in the first place.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.10
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:14.10.9
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.16.0-23.31-generic 3.16.4
Uname: Linux 3.16.0-23-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.14.7-0ubuntu8
Architecture: amd64
CrashDB: ubuntu
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Sat Oct 25 14:06:48 2014
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-05-29 (148 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140417)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
Symptom: ubuntu-release-upgrader
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to utopic on 2014-10-24 (0 days ago)
VarLogDistupgradeTermlog:

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Colin - Could you have a look at what went wrong here?

[Ubfan (ubfan1)]

I have lost ubuntu...shim boot entries when installing/updating USB flash sticks. Updating 14.04 last week, on a USB3 8G stick caused a nvram ram entry for the hard disk Ubuntu installation to be deleted. This entry was for the shim bootloader, unused since secure boot was disabled, but previously, the shim entry was deleted when secure boot was enabled. Nothing in the USB update should have touched anything in nvram on the host machine.