It is safe to install on non efi systems, and as shipped, Ubuntu provides an EFI system partition mounted at /boot/efi. It appears on your system this partition is no longer mounted, causing the error. It is correct for grub to fail the upgrade rather than leaving the ESP contents not updated.
If you are not going to have /boot/efi mounted, the other option is to uninstall shim-signed and grub-efi-amd64-signed; this will prevent you from transitioning this install to use UEFI in the future. ** Changed in: grub2-signed (Ubuntu) Status: New => Invalid -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1931518 Title: grub-efi-amd64-signed 1.167~18.04.1+2.04-1ubuntu44 has broken non-EFI install To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2-signed/+bug/1931518/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs