I managed to solve the problem after a lot of struggle. I would like to summarize my efforts with my own idea as to how the problem was solved. (I will of course admit that I am not too knowledgeable!)
Firstly, I discovered that the system was running EFI (so reconfiguring grub-pc did not work -- it is possible that I checked the wrong partition while doing this, but I am not sure if that did some harm). >From the grub rescue stage, I found that I could go to grub stage using the following commands (sometimes only after using the full path and file name instead of /vmlinuz and /initrd.img) insmod linux linux /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/mapper/vg-root initrd /initrd.img The second of these commands gave error: premature end of file The last command gave unaligned pointer ox3880621b1a006275 Aborted. Press any key to exit. When I pressed a key, it gave me the grub menu, with all options of Ubuntu and Windows (until I ran boot-repair). So that was a partial success, despite the error messages. I booted into the latest Ubuntu version, and ran boot-repair with the recommended option. This did not help. http://paste.ubuntu.com/7403468 said "An error occurred during the repair." The bottom line seemed to be : "The boot files of [The OS now in use - Ubuntu 14.04 LTS] are far from the start of the disk. Your BIOS may not detect them. You may want to retry after creating a /boot partition (EXT4, >200MB, start of the disk)." Since Windows 8 came pre-installed in the first partition, and since everything worked fine until upgrade to 14.04, I did not want to follow this suggestion, which would mean reinstalling everything. At this stage, I consulted a colleague in our computing centre. He found that in the bios boot priority list, windows came before ubuntu, and changed it to boot ubuntu first. After this change, the main problem was solved, and the system gave the grub menu with all operating systems listed. However, this worked fine for booting ubuntu, but on trying to boot windows it failed. At this stage, I remembered the posting of Fred Palmer on May 3 in this forum. He said that "Boot-Repair does the rename for 'buggy' UEFI." He also said: " To undo & to rename files to their original names, you just need to tick the "Restore EFI backups" option of Boot-Repair." (See also the posting of SatPhil on May 2 in this forum, which is probably related). I followed this instruction and ran boot-repair with the option he mentioned. Now I have a system which boots correctly ubuntu as well as windows. I hope this will be helpful -- 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
