Comment 193 for bug 1289977

just a few thoughts (opinions ;) )...

I have posted previously in the thread and followed it since then. I sympathise with both sides - both 'its a bug' and 'its the user' but on consideration IMHO neither are 100% right.

My hardware is a Dell box with an Intel RAID controller set up with one volume mirroring a pair of 400(ish)Gb drives. As previously stated I installed 13.04 last year (LVM enabled) on a clean machine (no operating system) then this year upgraded to 13.10 successfully and then bricked the box with 14.04. At no time did I run boot-repair on the 13.x installs - if a boot loader is working I leave it well alone. So from an end user point of view there is a bug - a normal upgrade bricked my machine with no warning. Where that bug lies is kind of hard to pin down.

I have since set up a Virtualbox to try to replicate the issue - unfortunately(!) the upgrade chain didn't fail.
VirtualBox does not allow the emulation of hardware RAID controllers and I _think_ that this may be where the root cause of issue lies. It may be that the new version of grub installed by the system upgrade doesn't handle the LVM/HW RAID combination particularly well.

As to not being able to detect the issue that caused the bricking of many machines - that is not strictly true is it? Us human end users are detecting the issue using standard tools available to the upgrade process.

The big problem from a dev/support point of view is that there appears no auditable set of actions that can reproduce the issue - and I know that I am not about to tear down my now working 14.04 install, wipe the disks and start again from 13.04 just to prove (or not) a point - life is too short! Other end users are probably in the same position.