Comment 249 for bug 1289977

Folks,
I was bit by this today, turning my dual-bootable laptop into a brick.
I tried a lot of things here and nothing worked.
What did work for me was following directions in http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/245
I'm running Linux Mint 17 Qiana, which is based on Ubuntu 14.04
I was upgrading from Mint 16 to Mint 17 and the install appeared to work fine.

For me, the following worked:

             mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
             grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda
             reboot

which is close to some suggestions others made but those didn't work for me.
Obviously you'd need to change the sda5 to whatever is appropriate for you.
No, I have not made a typo above. There is no trailing number on the sda for the grub-install command.

The above for me worked, despite the error message:
          "grub-probe: error: failed to get canonical path of /cow."
Hope this helps.