Cannot boot from grub after upgrade

[Paul Goins]

Since upgrading from Focal, it seems that I'm hitting boot problems every time Grub is ugpraded.

For context, I recently upgrade from Focal to Groovy, then on the same day, to Hirsute (prerelease).

On the upgrade to Groovy, my system stopped booting to grub, and I needed to load a Groovy install USB and run "grub-install" to make my system bootable. (More specifically: grub-install --uefi-secure-boot --boot-directory=<mounted /boot> --efi-directory=<mounted /boot>/efi)

On the upgrade to Hirsute, the same thing occurred, and I had to repeat the same to be able to boot.

And after package upgrades yesterday, when I powered on my machine today, the same thing occurred again, so I gathered some details this time around.

The following grub packages changed during last night's upgrade:

grub-pc-bin:amd64 (2.04-1ubuntu40 -> 2.04-1ubuntu44)
grub-efi-amd64-signed:amd64 (1.163+2.04-1ubuntu40 -> 1.166+2.04-1ubuntu44)
grub-efi-amd64-bin:amd64 (2.04-1ubuntu40 -> 2.04-1ubuntu44)
grub-common:amd64 (2.04-1ubuntu40 -> 2.04-1ubuntu44)
grub-pc:amd64 (2.04-1ubuntu40 -> 2.04-1ubuntu44)

As context, my system uses EFI (secure boot on if I recall right), and my disk is partitioned as follows:

Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 1050623 1048576 512M EFI System <- /boot/efi
/dev/sda2 1050624 2549759 1499136 732M Linux filesystem <- /boot
/dev/sda3 2549760 500632903 498083144 237.5G Linux filesystem <- / (encrypted LVM)
/dev/sda4 500633600 500666367 32768 16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda5 500666368 999149401 498483034 237.7G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda6 999149568 1000212479 1062912 519M Windows recovery environment

Also, note that simply doing "sudo update-grub" does *not* trigger this problem. It seems to be something which happens at upgrade time.

Please let me know if there's any other info I can gather for this; I fully expect this problem to recur the next time grub gets upgraded as well.
---
ProblemType: Bug
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu59
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: unknown
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 21.04
InstallationDate: Installed on 2019-01-04 (796 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" - Release amd64 (20181017.3)
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair
Package: grub2 (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.10.0-14.15-generic 5.10.11
SourcePackage: grub2
Tags: hirsute
Uname: Linux 5.10.0-14-generic x86_64
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to hirsute on 2021-03-02 (8 days ago)
UserGroups: N/A
_MarkForUpload: True

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

Please run apport-collect to collect the data that is normally collected when reporting a bug using ubuntu-bug.

update-grub does not update grub, so it's not surprising that nothing changes (it updates the config file). Run sudo dpkg-reconfigure grub-efi-amd64-signed and look at its output, or directly /usr/lib/grub/grub-multi-install (or more directly grub-install). Perhaps something is misconfigured?

[Paul Goins (vultaire)]

1. I ran dpkg-reconfigure as requested; here's what I saw:

root@dell2018:~# dpkg-reconfigure grub-efi-amd64-signed
Installing grub to /boot/efi.
Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
Installation finished. No error reported.

2. I ran "apport-collect 1918314", and it appears to have set the apport-collected tag here, but it also gave me a traceback and a 400: Bad Request error. Should I retry that, or are there other specific flags I should be trying?

[Paul Goins (vultaire)]

Hit Enter too soon on my previous comment. The "dpkg-reconfigure grub-efi-amd64-signed" reproduced the issue, and again, had to grub-install via a hirsute USB install disk. (Same command as previously reported, although I dropped --uefi-secure-boot this time around out of curiosity, and it still worked.)

[Paul Goins (vultaire)]

Additionally, tried grub-install directly from within hirsute:

root@dell2018:~# grub-install
Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
Installation finished. No error reported.

When I reboot... same problem. Had to again recover via the USB installer.

[Paul Goins (vultaire)]

apport information

[Paul Goins (vultaire)]

apport information

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for grub2 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]