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

[David Tombs]

Hi Carl,

Sorry that your upgrade experience was so terrible. I'm not too familiar
with GRUB, but I can point you to the options on
<http://www.ubuntu.com/support> where you may be able to find help. This
list is not for support discussions and you will probably have better
luck there.

Thanks,
David

On 05/10/2010 01:05 PM, Carl Anderson wrote:
> Also, I meant to say I went from 9.10 to 10.04, not 9.04.  I had
> followed the instructions and had just upgraded all my 9.10 packages
> before doing the 10.04 upgrade...
> 
> Carl
> 
> On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 12:00 PM, Carl Anderson <carl.anderson at gmail.com
> <mailto:carl.anderson at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     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
> 
>