Symptoms

• Just performed an upgrade on Ubuntu
• System won’t boot, can’t ssh
• System seems fine diagnostics wise
• /var/log doesn’t contain any information about what might be going wrong - no updates to logs since last shutdown

I upgraded a server to Itrepid Ibex recently (8.10) from 8.04 and upon reboot it would not come back. Unfortunately I was doing this entirely remotely, so I had no idea what was going on and couldn’t see anything. I got a recovery console up and eventually found a problem with /boot/grub/menu.1st: initrd below my default entry was missing. Here’s one bug report of it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/initramfs-tools/+bug/292534 and another https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub/+bug/222421.