There are a lot of similar bug reports for this, but they all seem stalled.
Here's a specific issue with a proposed one-line patch that works.
When I boot my Ubuntu 16.04.2 and select recovery mode, the menu text is unreadable, showing boxes instead of characters, like console-setup hasn't ran, while it did.
Then I edit /lib/recovery-mode/recovery-menu and insert the following line at the top:
udevadm trigger && udevadm settle -t 10
After I reboot, the problem is gone.
I'll attach two screenshots, "before.png" and "after.png", showing the issue.
Some info for my localization setup; but it shouldn't matter, it should be the same in any locale.
$ cat /etc/default/locale
LANG="el_GR.UTF-8"
$ cat /etc/default/console-setup
ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"
CHARMAP="UTF-8"
CODESET="guess"
FONTFACE="Fixed"
FONTSIZE="8x16"
VIDEOMODE=
I'm attaching a one-liner patch that calls `udevadm trigger` from the system service file instead, which is the same that the friendly-recovery upstart job does as well.
Note that there were 2 errors in the service file:
1) ExecStartPre=
The path there is wrong, because udevadm is in /sbin. The attached patch solves this as well as the font issue, in one line.
2) ExecStartPre=
The author there meant "sh -c", to run the command, instead of "sh -e". This is a separate issue. But since it's in the same .service file, maybe we can SRU both issues with one upload.
I suggest that this line is removed completely because it just hangs if "sh -c" is used.