no symbol table

[labzilla]

Running dual boot with Windows 10 and GRUB installed on /dev/sda5. I upgraded from LTS 16.04, when I boot I get the following message

error: no symbol table.

press any key to continue...

I tried re-installing GRUB

[labzilla] ~ $ sudo grub-install /dev/sda5
Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: warning: File system `ext2' doesn't support embedding.
grub-install: warning: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..
grub-install: error: will not proceed with blocklists.

[Snowhog]

Is /dev/sda2 formatted as ext2? It should be ext4 (unless you are wanting to use btrfs).

[labzilla]

My partition is EXT3. Are these the correct steps to convert to EXT4

tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/sdaX

e2fsck -pf /dev/sdaX

update /etc/fstab

I know I'll need to boot linux from a flash drive to do this