Unable to boot previously working install probably due to firmware bug

[phitolo]

OK so I still didn't find the solution to the problem yet. First let me say I would really like to avoid having to reinstall Ubuntu, as I didn't do it in the first place and I will have quite some trouble setting everything up as it was.
Again everything worked fine until the firmware bug, so I still hope a small change again will be able to solve this. I looked into all of the firmware setup options and everything seems to be set up fine, SATA is set in AHCI mode. Also both hard drives (the SSD and the regular one) appear in the firmware, they just don't appear as UEFI drives. Also after starting on the Boot repair live disk I am able to mount all of the partitions including the LVM ones and they seem fine. The EFI system partition is also there, though I am not expert enough to tell whether all the booting files are there where they should.

As a next step I will probably try and reset default firmware setting (after taking screenshots of the current ones) and moving back step by step.

If anyone knowledgeable with LVM installs has any other suggestions based on the initial pastebin I'll greatly appreciate. Thanks.

[angisky]

I personally have never had an issues with this but when in doubt go legacy mode. I would definitely reinstall grub. Usually the scripts for it auto-detect your OS's so it really shouldn't even be difficult to do. If you wanna get creative while your at it there different things you can do to make grub look nicer (or you could make it not appear at all at boot).

[phitolo]

Restoring firmware default settings did not solve the problem. Since boot repair gives an error message when asked to repair ("Please close all your package managers (software center, update manager, synaptic, ...). Then try again.") I would like to attempt a manual reinstall of Grub.

Could someone (oldfred maybe?) please check the commands below and the boot info pastebin here http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/YzjvGQ7pwH/ , see if the following way of reinstalling Grub on this system appears correct (I have a big doubt (see question marks below) regarding the device name I need to provide when calling grub-install):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lvm2

sudo mount /dev/mapper/vg00-lv00_root /mnt
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt/boot
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/boot/efi
sudo chroot /mnt

apt-get install grub-efi-amd64
grub-install --efi-directory=/mnt/boot/efi --boot-directory=/mnt/boot /dev/nvme0n1??????????????

update-grub

exit

sudo umount /mnt/boot/efi
sudo umount /mnt/boot
sudo umount /mnt

[oldfred]

Do not really know LVM. Is it also encrypted? You need that driver & mount with passphase.

Since you have separate /var I would also mount it.

chroot with UEFI, LVM, encryption on NVMe drive
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread....8#post13602088
UEFI chroot
http://askubuntu.com/questions/53578...er/57380#57380
To chroot, you need the same 32bit or 64 bit kernel. Best to use same version.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BasicChroot

[phitolo]

There is no encryption present.

Can I have your opinion on whether /dev/nvme0n1 (the SSD drive) is the correct device name for grub-install? Thanks.

[oldfred]

Whether old BIOS/legacy or newer UEFI, you always specify a drive.

But with UEFI, Ubuntu's grub only installs to first ESP, normally sda (with my systems). But it knows NVMe drives & will install UEFI boot files into the ESP on the NVMe drive.
With my system every test or second install to sdb or external drive, always installs to sda's ESP and overwrites my main working install's /EFI/ubuntu folder. Quickly learned to backup ESP. But real difference is only one line in /EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg with UUID & drive/partition of full grub.cfg in the install, so now I normally just edit that back to main working install's partition.

[phitolo]

OK, so thanks everyone who tried to help. I tried the manual install of grub which didn't work. I than managed to have boot-repair work, which told me in the end that it was able to repair the system but I could still not boot the system. In the end I chose to do a clear CMOS (before I just did a restore to default values) and by magic that solved the problem, I was able to see the UEFI hard disk in the firmware again and select it as default boot device, and eveything booted fine form there on.
I'm still not sure what the problem was the lesson I learned is that, while old BIOS may have had some limitations they had almost no bugs, while new firmwares have more features but also more bugs.