GRUB not updating, showing old kernels in boot menu on Ubuntu 14.04

Grub boot problem on Ubuntu 14.04 that people seem to have had for older versions too: the grub boot loader does not get updated with newly installed kernels. Did not find a solution on the net though, so here goes.

Newer kernels get installed but do not show up in the boot menu. A bit puzzling, non of update-grub, grub-install /dev/sda or adding and removing kernel packages made any difference. At boot there was still the same stubborn list of old kernels, and the new ones were not listed.

Turns out somehow grub (v1), Ubuntu package name ‘grub’ had ended up on my system, where the config was grub2 based. So I did apt-get remove grub; apt-get install grub-pc and all was well again, including the latest and greatest kernel in the boot menu.

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