Boots into Blinking Cursor and Black Screen After Auto Update

Question

14.04 LTS.
Auto updated, rebooted, bios posts, goes to a black screen with blinking cursor.
Holding shift after Bios post will display the letters GRUB but nothing else.
No other inputs appear to have any effect (tried "alt ->" and "alt<-"; also tried alt+ctrl+f1; and typing my password + enter)
I can still dual boot into Windows.
I can boot into a Live CD but unsure how to fix this.
Last month I had this problem:
After Repairing Deleted Kernel, why would GRUB still not boot into Linux.
I just tried those steps again, shooting in the dark, to no avail.
Please help... What is going on with my Ubuntu install!?

Answer 1

if you get grub. from a LiveCD. press c to get a command line. change the drive refences as need for your install

From grub type ls (hd0,2)/boot/

you should see a file named vmlinuz or linux, and initrd.img. with version numbers

type: linux (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz-#### root=/dev/sda2 or linux (hd0,2)/boot/linux-#### root=/dev/sda2 depending on what you found with ls (hd0,1)/ then

`initrd (hd0,2)/boot/initrd-#####.img`

boot

if you get initramfs rescue mode -- enter your password then startx you should now have a desktop.

use gparted to check your file system, if it reports an error, then you need to boot from a LiveCD or other media to fix it .... DO NOT attempt to repair a mounted partition.

The following three commands fix many grub boot problems. They run quick so just do all three instead of trying to find which one you need.

sudo install-grub /dev/sda, sudo update-grub and sudo update-initramfs -u

reboot and see what you get