apt-get installs grub-pc package 2.02-2ubuntu8.21 without errors, but the machine fails to boot

[Rudolf Visagie]

We are creating AWS AMIs using an EBS surrogate and running this command which completes successfully without any errors (only specific package shown):

Distribution: bionic

apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends grub-pc

Afterwards when we check the /grub directory it is incomplete:

ls -l grub/
total 2348
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 712 Jan 26 08:18 gfxblacklist.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2397557 Jan 26 08:18 unicode.pf2

An instance created using the AMI also fails to boot with the following error:

No bootable disk

The grub-pc version installed is 2.02-2ubuntu8.21.

If we install grub manually using grub-install and grub-mkconfig it works with the same version (2.02-2ubuntu8.21).

The above mentioned automated AMI creation process running apt-get also works if we downgrade to version 2.02-2ubuntu8.17.

Previously we created images with version 2.02-2ubuntu8.18 (as that was the current version at the time) and it worked perfectly, but we noticed that this has been removed from the Ubuntu archive: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/g/grub2/ (only 2.02-2ubuntu8.17 and 2.02-2ubuntu8.21 still available).

From the changelog it seems likely that the breaking change could have been introduced here: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/2.02-2ubuntu8.19

[Mate Kukri (mkukri)]

Hi,
Is this still an issue?