Comment 134 for bug 1289977

@psusi, Phillip, of course one of the first things that I did was to do a dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc, but this didn't rewrite the MBR bootstrap or give me any meaningful diagnostics to help me restore my system. Where are the configuration guidelines documented to set enable reconfiguration of this package to "run grub-install /dev/sda after the next upgrade"? A URI would be nice.

I believe that there's clearly a logic fail in this grub-pc package. I didn't do any nasty Q&Ds in the first place; I just did the obvious setup process to dual-boot, because -- at least until 13.10 -- it worked, out-of-the-box. From the number of people being hit, it seems that this failure is pretty systemic for a large class users who have other than a single-disk, single-boot image configuration

If your assertion that the upgrade (of grub) "can't be validated in an automatic way" is taken with the 14.04 team's decision to do a mandatory grub update as part of the 13.10->14.04 upgrade, then you are also implying that Ubuntu's position is that it is acceptable that the 14.04 upgrade for this class of users can trash their systems. And this isn't even documented as a caution in the 14.04 known issues.

In my mind, this position *isn't acceptable.* What should we tell such standard users in this class: are we just recommending that they should move to another Linux distro, or shall we just continue to trash a percentage of their PCs?

My own priority was to restore my laptop to a point where it was usable, and where I didn't have to bootstrap through a system recovery USB, leaving my main account with its encrypted home directory inaccessible through normal login. I trust that you guys, that is the Ubuntu grub2 developers, will fix this issue some time in the next six months. And if you don't then I have a work around that I will use again. For my own development work, I'll just stick with my contributions to PHP internals -- À chacun son goût, neh?