Installation on an Acer Travelmate Spin B1 hangs during grub package

[Dave Jones]

Attempted installation of Ubuntu 16.04.3 on an Acer Travelmate Spin B1. It appears to hang during installation of the grub package (it's difficult to tell due to the lack of a storage indicator light on the laptop, but after waiting quarter of an hour with no change in the process I figured a hang was a safe assumption). Digging into the process tree indicated that the grub package was attempting to run:

cat /sys/firmware/efi/vars/OsIndicationsSupported-8be4df61-93ca-11d2-aa0d-00e098032b8c/data

And this appears to hang on this platform (I attempted it manually from a terminal). I killed the offending command (with sudo kill <pid>) to see if the installer would eventually determine things had gone wrong and quit sensibly. It eventually did, but only after a few more "sudo kill" operations on various hung processes. I'd assume this is down to something horribly strange about Acer's UEFI setup which I'll spend tomorrow googling!

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: ubiquity 2.21.63.4 [modified: lib/partman/automatically_partition/question]
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.10.0-28.32~16.04.2-generic 4.10.17
Uname: Linux 4.10.0-28-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.10
Architecture: amd64
CasperVersion: 1.376.2
Date: Wed Oct 18 00:03:23 2017
InstallCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/casper/vmlinuz.efi file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash ---
LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20170801)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: grub-installer
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Highskillcharly (gabriel-charly-e)]

Ubuntu 18.04, still hangs on grub, same issue :(

[Highskillcharly (gabriel-charly-e)]

I do not believe this bug is a duplicate of 1767703.
There are no python exceptions and no "GrubInstaller failed with code", the installation
simply hangs and the kernel oopses while accessing the efi.

Also non of the mentioned fixes actually work here, the spin b1 can not boot in legacy mode AFAICT.

I eventually got it to work by disabling secure boot and adding noefi the the boot command line options[1] in grub just bevore starting the instalation.

Hit "e" on the install opition, add "noefi" before the "quiet splash" stuff.

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/fb834c7acc5e140cf4f9e86da93a66de8c0514da

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

What in the world? Your syslog says that grub-install tried to run efibootmgr, and it is not found. Can you run apt-cache policy efibootmgr and post the output?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for grub-installer (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]