grub2-efi-signed refuses to install to SSD drive

[Gablewatts]

I've been trying to reinstall various versions of Ubuntu onto my System76 Lemur laptop with a Samsung ATA SSD and everytime I run the installer everything proceeds fine until grub2-efi-signed package tries to install and that repeatedly fails giving an error message that is not useful (it just says it failed to install giving no indication why).

I tried reformatting the EFI partition to FAT32 and retrying but even the same failure occurs when the grub2-efi-signed package tries to install itself.

My guess is there is something that the installer doesn't expect in the boot sectors of the SSD and this causes the installation of the grub2-efi-signed package to fail (without giving any useful info).

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: ubiquity 18.04.14.6 [modified: lib/partman/automatically_partition/question]
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-29.31-generic 4.15.18
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-29-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.2
Architecture: amd64
CasperVersion: 1.394
Date: Mon Jul 22 16:19:12 2019
InstallCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/xubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash ---
LiveMediaBuild: Xubuntu 18.04.1 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20180725)
SourcePackage: grub-installer
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Jeremy (wa113y3s)]

Try installing without internet connection

[Gablewatts (gablewatts)]

I finally discovered what the problem was:

Somehow the SecureBoot keys that are installed by default on my laptop were deleted. Once I "Factory Restored" those SecureBoot keys in my UEFI System Settings, then the Ubuntu installer would finish installing without error.

So the only thing that would have really helped would have been a helpful error message when the grub2-efi-signed package failed to install.