I know a lot has been said already, but I want to add my case just for the record. It just might contain info on what went unexpectedly right or wrong when it shouldn't have.
I had a working 13.10 installation on a (pretty ancient but indestructible) Panasonic CF-18 Toughbook. This is one of the devices from the time that PAE was enabled but kept secret. I had modified the grub configuration to show the menu at boot, using the "normal" way of editing /etc/default/grub and running sudo update-grub. The menu showed, so this worked. No error messages. I had 3 partitions on only one hard drive: /, /boot and swap. I always like to have a separate boot partition in case things go wrong, but reading the comments this has bitten me now. >From the grub_rescue prompt, I can barely do anything, but the "ls" command >works and I see that: (hd0,msdos3) contains an EMPTY /boot/grub directory, (hd0,msdos2) contains no files (the swap partition) (hd0,msdos1) contains the images (like vmlinuz-3.8.0-34-generic) in its root directory and a /grub directory, but no /boot directory. Something is definitely broken here! For the record, none of these partitions were formatted with a FAT filesystem. After I did "sudo do-release-upgrade", I waited with the reboot, and re- added my third party add-ins. I read that fake-pae was no longer needed, but a kernel option "forcepae" was, so I removed the repository that provided the fake-pae package, added that option to /etc/default/grub and ran "sudo update-grub". No error message there either. My 2 cents: the release updater and update-grub should be able to tell what partition is the boot partition, so a misconfiguration on only one hard drive should be detected. I never manually messed with it, but just followed the installation wizzard when I installed Xubuntu. If the system was misconfigured, it gues that must have happened by either a system upgrade or the update-grub command. In any case, I would certainly expect update-grub to have warned me. Well, the rest you can guess: I shut down the machine in full confidence of an upgrade done well and was left with a system that does not boot anymore. Don't take this too hard, I am a "half-power" user, so I am not afraid to fix things. I just want to add that I was not using UEFI, not using more than one drive and have not yet (or in the past) repaired the boot process, though I did do some minor configuration in the proper way. So, please take this bug seriously. I is a critical one. By the way: the "grub rescue>" prompt does not know the "help" command. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1289977 Title: Ubuntu 14.04 Update breaks grub, resulting in "error: symbol 'grub_term_highlight_color' not found" To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1289977/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs