[SOLVED] Weird kernel issues after upgrading from Wily to Xenial

[Princey]

I upgraded to Xenial from Wily yesterday and while I did not babysit the upgrade to have noticed anything untoward, I have been able to successfully restart and continue using my laptop after the upgrade until I clicked "yes" to a vmware prompt for an upgrade. That's where I ran into issues. VMWARE said that it can't find the C libraries needed to recompile my kernel so I found that strange. Did some poking around only to find that I've got a weird kernel issue. Here's part of the results from the CLI:

emm@lapace:~$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
linux-headers-generic is already the newest version (4.4.0.21.22).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
emm@lapace:~$ uname -r
4.2.0-34-generic

As you can see, the package manager says I have kernel headers 4.4.0.21.22 installed yet 'uname -r' and 'uname -a' gives me 4.2.0-34. More so, when I search to see what's installed, I get:

emm@lapace:~$ dpkg --get-selections | grep linux-headers
linux-headers-4.4.0-21 install
linux-headers-4.4.0-21-generic install
linux-headers-generic install

Any ideas how to fix it outside of a clean install after backing up?

[Princey]

Okay, I've played with the system for several hours before finding a fix. The problem was that on upgrade, when the call was made to update grub with the new kernel image by intransf, (taking a look at the logs) the temp directory was not yet created. So, as a result, grub was still using the old kernel ov 4.2xxx even when 4.4 was the one installed. Seeing that it was this kernel booted from, then the system would detect what's loaded in ram and not what was on the disk. Solution, was to purge grub completely including boot files and reinstall grub.

Just thought I'd post this here just in case someone runs into the same problem.