CRITICAL: 13.10->14.04 upgrade BREAKS GRUP, renders computer UNBOOTABLE

[teo1978]

Great!
I decided to finally upgrade from 13.10 to 14.04, and after the whole upgrade process and the restart, the computer won't boot!!

I get a black screen with this error instead of the familiar boot menu:

  error: symbol `grub_term_highlight_color' not found
  grub rescue> _

Not only can't I boot ubuntu, I can't boot any other OS I had installed on the computer (namely Windows 8).
I am reporting this from another computer.
How do I fix it now?

Do you test distribution upgrades before releasing them? Well, obviously not enough. And _after_ releasing them, because it's been a f***ing month or two since it was released.

At EVERY SINGLE UPGRADE I always get some huge problem that renders my system completely unusable and needs some pretty radical fix. But this is the most f***ed up and low level one ever. At the next upgrade I guess I'll get hardware damage.

During the upgrade there was some crash: the "system problem detected" (or whatever it is called) window popped up, informing of some crash related to VirtualBox (and uslessly offering me the option to report it, just to later tell me it couldn't be reported, as usual with third-party packages). I don't know if that is related and I know that's a third party package, however distribution-upgrade must be rocksolid and it can't brick a whole system just because of a broken package (even assuming that's broken). It must either fix the problem with the package, or offer the option to remove it, or roll back the whole upgrade if it cannot be complete 100% safely.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.04
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:0.192.13
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.8.0-31.46-generic 3.8.13.8
Uname: Linux 3.8.0-31-generic i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.9.2-0ubuntu8.4
Architecture: i386
CrashDB: ubuntu
Date: Sat May 24 19:48:05 2014
InstallationDate: Installed on 2010-06-23 (1431 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
MarkForUpload: True
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
Symptom: dist-upgrade
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to raring on 2013-08-10 (287 days ago)
VarLogDistupgradeTermlog:

[teo1978 (teo8976)]

Changing to confirmed because one single case is enough. No point in waiting for some other user to have its system destroyed.

[teo1978 (teo8976)]

And I know you would like me to run "apport-collect" from the affected machine. I would like to be able to do that too.

[Teo (teo1978)]

OMFG, reported 2 months ago and still no action has been taken at least to shut down the automatic upgrades until it's fixed!!

Dup of #1289977