Comment 6 for bug 365331

Rebooted to 9.10 live CD, mounted my hard drives manually.

Ran grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/sdb1 /dev/sdb

That gave me a bunch of files in /mnt/sdb1/grub, but no grub.cfg. I did, however, have /mnt/sdb1/grub.d/*

Then did mount --bind /dev /mny/sdb1/dev && mount --bind /proc /dev/sdb1/proc && chroot /mnt/sdb1
and took a look around, and discovered I was running grub 1.x, but grub-common version was for grub 2.x. So I'm wondering if the problem is because upgraded systems are left with grub 1, but one or more recent upgrades result in a dependency on grub 2.

Installed grub-pc and ran update-grub2 /dev/sdb, which generated grub.cfg, though it gave an error "Cannot find list of partitions!"

Rebooted, and it died on "GRUB loading, please wait..." suggesting it was getting grub 1 from somewhere.

Finally got my system bootable again by burning a copy of the Ubuntu alt/recovery CD, booting that, using its menu option to launch a shell with /dev/sdb1 as root, then running grub-install and update-grub.