Bug#908774: grub-common: Update to buster breaks booting

[Steve McIntyre]

Hi Michael,

Apologies for the delayed response to your bug report. I'm going
through trying to help triage older Grub/EFI bug reports, and this
stands out...

On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 09:23:13PM +0200, Michael Kesper wrote:
>Package: grub-common
>Version: 2.02+dfsg1-6
>Severity: important
>Tags: d-i
>
>Dear Maintainer,
>
>*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***
>
>   * What led up to the situation?
>
>updating grub-common from stretch to buster
>
>   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
>     ineffective)?
>
>sudo apt upgrade (after adding buster to apt sources and
>setting buster as default release)
>
>   * What was the outcome of this action?
>
>After a reboot the system did not boot from ssd at all
>
>   * What outcome did you expect instead?
>
>A system that's able to reboot
>
>- System was on legacy boot before upgrading
>- Upgrading installs grub-efi-amd64, setting boot to EFI
>- grub-efi-amd64 fails because it tries to write to NVRAM / EFI partition
>- there will only be a small error message "system may be unbootable"
>- After reboot, it's not possible to boot

Are you 100% sure you didn't do anything else here to change system
configuration? There's *nothing* in the grub packaging that should be
trying to automatically switch from grub-pc to grub-efi-amd64 on a
straight upgrade!

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve at einval.com
< sladen> I actually stayed in a hotel and arrived to find a post-it
          note stuck to the mini-bar saying "Paul: This fridge and
          fittings are the correct way around and do not need altering"