[Bug 1289977] Re: Ubuntu 14.04 Update breaks grub, resulting in "error: symbol 'grub_term_highlight_color' not found"

[BenM]

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.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1289977

Title:
  Ubuntu 14.04 Update breaks grub, resulting in "error: symbol
  'grub_term_highlight_color' not found"

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  Opinion

Bug description:
  The update from 13.10 to 14.04 via update-manager broke grub for me,
  which resulted in the grub error:

  "symbol 'grub_term_highlight_color' not found"

  on startup.

  To fix the problem I had to boot to my persisting Ubuntu installation
  (e.g. using Super Grub Disk) and had to reinstall grub on my boot
  partition: "sudo grub-install --recheck /dev/sdx"

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
  Package: grub2-common 2.02~beta2-6
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-16.36-generic 3.13.5
  Uname: Linux 3.13.0-16-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 2.13.3-0ubuntu1
  Architecture: amd64
  CurrentDesktop: Unity
  Date: Sun Mar  9 10:36:45 2014
  EcryptfsInUse: Yes
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-12-10 (88 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" - Release amd64 (20131016.1)
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=de_DE
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
   LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: grub2
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to trusty on 2014-03-07 (2 days ago)

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