Comment 129 for bug 1289977

Some thoughts after reading the comments to date:

The root cause of this error is stated clearly on #109

Various successful workarounds have been reported, including:
Identifying the device mounted on /boot then chrooting to it.
Then either manually uninstalling and reinstalling the grub packages
or running grub-install
or running dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc

The concensus appears to be a preference for dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc

However, many of the reports are from users with dual-boot Win8 installations (like mine)
dpkg-query -l 'grub*' shows that I have grub-efi-amd64 installed, but not grub-pc or grub-efi
It is probable that most pcs with Win8 have 64bit installations.

Would this procedure work?

boot from usb or cd
dpkg-query -l 'grub*'
  to determine which grub packages are installed (grub-efi-amd64 in my case)
df
  to determine device mounted on /boot/efi (sda2 in my case)
cd /tmp
mkdir mount-point
sudo mount /dev/sda2 /tmp/mount-point
sudo mount --bind /dev /tmp/mount-point/dev
sudo mount --bind /proc /tmp/mount-point/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /tmp/mount-point/sys
sudo chroot /tmp/mount-point
dpkg-reconfigure grub-efi-amd64