Grub fatal error and partial package install when installing to USB mounted SSD 18.10

[Karl Foley]

I have an HP ZBook 15 G2 on which I run Windows 10 from the internal drives, and occasionally boot to Ubuntu from an external SSD drive.

Drives are:
        sda 256GB SSD hosting Windows OS (Bitlocker encrypted)
        sdb 512GB SATA hosting data (Bitlocker encrypted)
        sdc 128GB SSD mounted via USB3 caddy

I downloaded the Cosmic desktop ISO and verified the SHA256 hash.
I used ether to copy this to two different 4GB USB sticks - I had the same issue with both.
Both writes were verified as accurate by etcher.

I booted the laptop to the 4GB USB stick by pressing F9 during boot and selecting that device.

I selected the USB3 attached SSD as the installation disk.

The installation proceeded normally but gave a fatal error installing Grub.
Reselecting the Grub install as /dev/sdc did not work - Same error.

I rebooted to SDC using F9 and got a black and white Grub screen.
I was able to repair the Grub environment by setting the root and manually loading the kernel and initrd.
I repaired the grub environment using grub-setup and was able to reboot normally.

Everything seemed normal but after installing Wireshark and Pidgin, there would not run because of missing files. Reinstalling the relevent packages fixed the missing files.

I installed debsums and could see there were hundreds of missing files - Too many to manually reinstall.

I worked around the problem by mounting the USB SSD under a new VM in Virtualbox and installing from the ISO in the VM. The system worked normallt once rebooted to the USB3 ISO.

Not sure if this is caused by Etcher?

[Karl Foley (u-karl)]

Please see bugs #1799761 Pidgin fails to start after install in 18.10, and #1800071 Wireshark fails to start after installation on 18.10.

These show some of the missing libraries after this failed install.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

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[Paul White (paulw2u)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all reported bugs in a timely manner.

Ubuntu 18.10 (cosmic) reached end-of-life on July 18, 2019.

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue when using a currently supported release of Ubuntu then please let us know otherwise this report can be left to expire in approximately 60 days time.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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