symbol 'grub_isprint' not found booting degraded software raid1/LVM volume

[Marius B. Kotsbak]

After upgrading to 14.04 (daily) and rebooting, grub stops with the message:

symbol 'grub_isprint' not found after upgrade to 14.04 (daily)

and enters rescue prompt. I was able to rescue the boot by running "grub-install" from a live USB stick with 12.04. Hard drives are using software raid1 and LVM. The RAID is was degraded, and running "update-grub" was printing a warning message:

"Couldn't find physical volume `(null)'. Some modules may be missing from core image."

(but it should be bootable). Fixing the degraded RAID and rerunning update-grub made it boot again.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: grub2 (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-26.40-generic 3.5.7.6
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-26-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.13.2-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: KDE
Date: Thu Mar 6 22:57:45 2014
InstallationDate: Installed on 2010-07-04 (1340 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100427.1)
SourcePackage: grub2
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to trusty on 2014-03-06 (0 days ago)

See also another user with the same problem: http://askubuntu.com/questions/420687/symbol-grub-isprint-not-found-error-on-boot-cannot-use-computer

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

This is a misconfiguration rather than a bug. Your array was degraded and so grub was only being installed to one of the disks, but your bios was continuing to boot from the other disk, with the old, now broken copy of grub.