Upgrade disaster - grub update failed and now my machine won't boot

[Carl Anderson]

I went through the GUI upgrade from 9.04 to 10.04 last night.  I habitually
keep my machine up to date, so this upgrade was not from some random or
uncommon configuration.

Everything went fine until grub was being installed / upgraded.  I got a
popup asking me to select a device where grub should be installed - in a way
it resembled fdisk output, there were the individual devices listed
(/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc) as well as the individual partitions on each.  I
selected the partition that contains my kernel images /dev/sda2 and tried to
install grub there.  I saw a message saying that the operation failed.
Luckily I was able to retry selecting a partition and so I select different
partitions.  I ended up trying all of my partitions individually until I had
tried them all.  I got the impression that I needed to select the drive
device rather than the partition.  So I ended up selecting both /dev/sda and
/dev/sdb and none of the individual partitions.  It reported success and
continued on the upgrade.  When it came time to reboot, I discovered that
the machine was locked at the point where GRUB usually pops up with a kernel
selection.  I don't see anything but a black screen.

I sure wish I knew what I did wrong!

Any help is appreciated - I'm writing from my work machine and won't be able
to try anything until i get home tonight.

Carl Anderson
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