Comment 23 for bug 496435

I encountered this bug today upgrading Kubuntu from a clean 10.04 install to 10.10 using the update-manager tool. The machine is 32-bit. It has no SATA controller at all. It's not a Dell (it's an older Asus-based dual athlon MP system). There is only one hard drive in the system. There is no other operating system on the machine; just one bootable partition which has Ubuntu installed. There were no errors during the install, except that a reboot left me hanging at "error: the symbol 'grub_xputs' not found" with a grub rescue prompt.

The only odd thing about the drives in this system is that there are two DVD burners on the on-board ATA controller, there is one ATA-133 drive attached to a 3Ware 8-port IDE RAID controller (Escalade 7500-8), and I have /boot set up as a separate partition, with an LVM root. I came here due to bug #609280 being marked a dup of this one.

I can run "ls /" at the prompt, and it shows that there is a grub/normal.mod file visible. However, when I try to insmod grub/normal.mod, I get the undefined symbol message from above.

Did Canonical hire the former Gentoo quality assurance team? :) I upgraded two (single drive) laptops today as well, and they both had kernel problems post-reboot. And now this bug which has been open for a year? Really? Sigh, off to find the rescue disks. Lemme know if there's any further information I can contribute which helps fix this. Or any further poking upstream Debian with a stick I can do.