[Bug 1889509] Re: grub boot error : "symbol 'grub_calloc' not found

[Pat Viafore]

Thank you @ianchanning for the recovery notes through the portal.

I'll also add in a few links that might help. 
For users looking for general recovery steps : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/GRUB2SecureBootBypass#Recovery 
For users looking how to mitigate this before rebooting: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/GRUB2SecureBootBypass#Known_issues


@hggdh2 Thank you for the informatoin, I am working with rcj on reproducing this issue. I was able to reproduce this issue with the following steps:

Launch an Ubuntu VM in Azure

az vm create --name grub-test --resource-group <resource-group-name>
--location southcentralus --image
Canonical:UbuntuServer:18.04-LTS:18.04.201906271 --size Standard_D2s_v3
--admin-username ubuntu --ssh-key-value <path-to-ssh-file>

Apt update and install grub:
sudo apt update
DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive sudo apt install grub2-common

You will see a prompt indicating that grub has failed to install.

Here's a pastebin of relevant disk information that I was able to gather before I installed grub. In #ubuntu-release on FreeNode there was talk of NVME devices exacerbating this bug, but there are  no nvme devices on this instance (as checked by ls /dev/nvme*)
https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/p/jD7kgDVtxk/

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1889509

Title:
  grub boot error : "symbol 'grub_calloc' not found

Status in grub2 package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in grub2 package in Debian:
  New

Bug description:
  After updating grub2 (to 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.26) and rebooting, my
  server does not boot:

  Booting from Hard Disk 0...
  error: symbol `grub_calloc' not found.
  Entering rescue mode...
  grub rescue> _

  I rebooted 3 servers in this way (all running Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS) and
  all hung.

  A lot of other people are reporting the same problem at:

  https://askubuntu.com/questions/1263125/how-to-fix-a-grub-boot-error-symbol-grub-calloc-not-
  found.

  ---

  Above most likely means that dpkg debconf no longer knows about the
  correct drives to install grub onto.

  Please boot & mount all the target disks and execute

  $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc

  You will be asked which drives to install grub onto, and then grub
  will be installed onto them, and more importantly, it will remember
  where to install grub to, on all future upgrades.

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