Fix Symbol 'grub_puts' Not Found When Migrating From Ubuntu Karmic To Lucid

Alexandre from jellykernel sent us a tip he wrote on his blog (in French) about an "Fix symbol 'grub_puts' not found" error when migrating from Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, so we'll translate it into English so it hopefully helps a lot of people.

To fix the "Fix symbol 'grub_puts' not found" error, you'll need a live Ubuntu CD. Boot from the CD, open a terminal and type:

sudo fdisk -l

You should see a list of your hard drives, and their partitions. Find the root partition (the one where your Ubuntu is installed). For example: /dev/sda1

Note: it's /dev/sdaX (where X is a number), not just /dev/sda (of course, on your computer it could be /dev/sdbX and so on).

Now must run the following command:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

Where /dev/sda1 is the root partition which like I told you, it can be /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, /dev/sdc1 and so on, depending on your system.


Then run the following commands:

sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
sudo chroot /mnt

Now check if Grub2 is installed:

apt-get install grub-pc

Then create a config file:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

And finally:

grub-install /dev/sda

Then reboot. If you're still having some issue, run update-grub:

sudo update-grub

Special thanks to jellykernel for sending us the tip!