[Bug 1901137] Re: UEFI on Legacy - grub-install fails due to no space left on ESP

[Jeremie Tamburini]

My bug report #1902269 has been marked as duplicated of this one even if
the description it's not exactly the same.

In any case it looks the problem is related to the EFI (ESP) partition,
that should never be used on old BIOS or UEFI in Legacy Mode, but for
some reasons the installer want it... even if we are NOT in "UEFI mode".

This might be related to recent changes of the installer https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/groovy-to-use-grub2-for-booting-installer-media-in-any-modes-on-all-architectures/16871
You have probably noticed that now there's no difference between uefi or bios mode. When you boot the live USB, you see the same grub menu.

After many tests, these are the case where the installation has been
successful:

- updating the system directly from Focal (from 20.04 to 20.10)

- creating an EFI partition during manual partitioning.
In this case the partition must be a primary partition.
(One user was able to set the EFI partition on a USB drive... it was not my case).

- Installing Ubuntu using the "Erase the disk and install Ubuntu.." will also succeed. EFI partition will be automatically created.
(Also the option "Install Ubuntu next Windows" should work, but there must be enough space for a primary partition for the EFI).


As reported on bug #1893964 (comment #8), the user was able to install the system skipping the "grub-install" launching Ubiquity with the command:
ubiquity -b
Then he manually recovered GRUB. I've tried the same, but with no success... still had problems with efi. The log reported several errors and one of them was: 
## pc systemd[1]: Dependency failed for /boot/efi.
## Subject: L'unità boot-efi.mount è fallita
## Defined-By: systemd
## Support: http://www.ubuntu.com/support


I hope there will be a solution as soon as possible, this is one of the worst bug ever :(
The only lucky thing is that Ubuntu 20.10 is NOT a LTS... other wise many more users could have been in trouble.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1901137

Title:
  UEFI on Legacy - grub-install fails due to no space left on ESP

Status in ubiquity package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  The system has PCLinuxOS on sda1 and sda2 Linux Mint 20 on sda9 and
  sda10 Windows 7 on sdb1 Windows 10 on sdb2

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.10
  Package: ubiquity 20.10.13
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.8.0-25.26-generic 5.8.14
  Uname: Linux 5.8.0-25-generic x86_64
  NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair
  ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu50
  Architecture: amd64
  CasperMD5CheckResult: pass
  CasperVersion: 1.455
  Date: Fri Oct 23 12:26:45 2020
  InstallCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu-mate.seed maybe-ubiquity quiet splash ---
  LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu-MATE 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" - Release amd64 (20201022)
  RebootRequiredPkgs:
   linux-image-5.8.0-25-generic
   linux-base
   linux-base
  SourcePackage: ubiquity
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

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