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

[DonQuichote]

I know a lot has been said already, but I want to add my case just for
the record. It just might contain info on what went unexpectedly right
or wrong when it shouldn't have.

I had a working 13.10 installation on a (pretty ancient but
indestructible) Panasonic CF-18 Toughbook. This is one of the devices
from the time that PAE was enabled but kept secret. I had modified the
grub configuration to show the menu at boot, using the "normal" way of
editing /etc/default/grub and running sudo update-grub. The menu showed,
so this worked. No error messages. I had 3 partitions on only one hard
drive: /, /boot and swap. I always like to have a separate boot
partition in case things go wrong, but reading the comments this has
bitten me now.

>From the grub_rescue prompt, I can barely do anything, but the "ls" command works and I see that:
(hd0,msdos3) contains an EMPTY /boot/grub directory,
(hd0,msdos2) contains no files (the swap partition)
(hd0,msdos1) contains the images (like vmlinuz-3.8.0-34-generic) in its root directory and a /grub directory, but no /boot directory.

Something is definitely broken here! For the record, none of these
partitions were formatted with a FAT filesystem.

After I did "sudo do-release-upgrade", I waited with the reboot, and re-
added my third party add-ins. I read that fake-pae was no longer needed,
but a kernel option "forcepae" was, so I removed the repository that
provided the fake-pae package, added that option to /etc/default/grub
and ran "sudo update-grub". No error message there either.

My 2 cents: the release updater and update-grub should be able to tell
what partition is the boot partition, so a misconfiguration on only one
hard drive should be detected. I never manually messed with it, but just
followed the installation wizzard when I installed Xubuntu. If the
system was misconfigured, it gues that must have happened by either a
system upgrade or the update-grub command. In any case, I would
certainly expect update-grub to have warned me.

Well, the rest you can guess: I shut down the machine in full confidence
of an upgrade done well and was left with a system that does not boot
anymore. Don't take this too hard, I am a "half-power" user, so I am not
afraid to fix things. I just want to add that I was not using UEFI, not
using more than one drive and have not yet (or in the past) repaired the
boot process, though I did do some minor configuration in the proper
way. So, please take this bug seriously. I is a critical one.

By the way: the "grub rescue>" prompt does not know the "help" command.

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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:
  Triaged

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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