Comment 38 for bug 1863434

Revision history for this message
Fritz Hudnut (este-el-paz) wrote : Re: [Bug 1863434] Re: 20.04 grub menu not visible

On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 8:30 AM Dimitri John Ledkov <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> Can someone please provide clear reproducer instructions?
>
> Ideally starting with a clean state (i.e. no installs / brand install)
> with affected hardware details (model, firmware version numbers, SKU
> numbers, etc)
>
> ** Changed in: grub2 (Ubuntu)
> Status: Confirmed => Incomplete
>
> After initial boot there is a blank black screen where grub should be
> visible.
> Grub is functional but not visible.
>
> Gents:

A lot of people have had issues with grub in the last 6 months or longer
and they posted their data about in this bug report.

It appears to relate to "EFI" and possibly how the installer is handling
where grub is put when pointed to "efi/boot" . . .?? My case might be more
"complicated" because I have 4 internal drives with 5 distros of linux and
a few OSX installs. Don't have time for a fresh install right now, but
traditionally when running an install I would select "advanced partitioner"
and I would point grub to go to the EFI partition of the drive I was
installing into . . . and all would go well, on reboot I would hold
alt/option key in my '12 Mac Pro, that would fire OSX boot manager which
would show available disks to boot from, and the linux options would show
as "EFI Boot" and I would select that and that would load Grub.

6 or more months ago, that changed, with a fresh install the grub listing
got messed up and finding the "EFI Boot" disk would bring a "grub rescue"
screen, in several linux installs grub was "messed up" . . . fortunately I
had SuperGrub2 and using that I was able to boot into a linux console and
chroot into OpenSUSE where I could run os-prober . . . that after several
attempts was enough to get grub "fixed" . . . now if I just "free boot" the
computer with no keystrokes, grub shows up and I can pick my system.
Possibly that is because I already had Grub installed, so I could run
"grub-update" . . . ???

I don't know, but from my non-technical viewpoint it appears that something
in the installer is not installing the /boot/EFI file??? for grub,
something is going wrong there? Is my "best guess" as to the problem.