GRUB badly broken during upgrade

[Avi Greenbury]

Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> I had a system with a working Ubuntu 11.04 and Xubuntu 12.04.
> I went to upgrade the Ubuntu to 11.10, and all seemed well until I
> went to reboot.
> It got confusing after that.  It looked like all of the right kernels
> were listed, but they all went to the same root.

What do you mean by this? Each listing should generally be the same
root (both by grub's definition of 'root' and the kernel's).

> I got in a rescue mode, and tried another update-grub.  Again it
> seemed to work, but now grub goes directly to
>   grub rescue>
> and I have no idea what to do there.  So I'm writing this on another
> system, on which I'm not likely to upgrade the Ubuntu any time soon
> 8o)

Have you tried a grub1 CD, if you've one to hand?

-- 
Avi