getting: error: invalid arch independent ELF magic

[Mark Stosberg]

Hello Grub users,

I'm a seasoned Linux user and installer, and Grub has worked well for me
and for many years. I've appreciated it's utility. Last night I ran into
a situation I can't past to get a new laptop to boot.

My symptom is that on boot I get:
   error: invalid arch independent ELF magic

And then the Grub rescue prompt.

Here's how I got into this pickle:

I started with a brand new Lenovo x120e laptop, which shipped with
Windows 7 on it.

I started by using the Ubuntu Lucid Lynx x86 installer. It complained
that there was "no bootable kernel found", but I let the installation
finish anyway. At that point, I think Grub was installed into the MBR,
but indeed, there was no entry for Linux.

Sometime during this installation I realized that this laptop used the
AMD64 architecture, which is presumably why no kernel was found from the
x86 installer. This time, I downloaded the latest "Natty" beta and ran
that installer. It seemed to complete without error, but left the
machine in this state.

>From this point, I can still boot into the USB stick installer, and
mount the main drive, and run "update-grub", but the problem has persisted.

I also learned that this laptop has "UEFI", and it looks like Natty had
installed the related grub packages for UEFI. There are some bootloader
options in the BIOS, such was whether it tries "legacy booting" first or
"UEFI" first. Neither works.

I read that UEFI uses a special FAT partition for booting. Perhaps I
introduced a problem because of my unusual pattern of installing from
x86 disk and then re-using the same patterns for an AMD64 install.

Anyway, I'm new to EFI and AMD64 as well as Grub 2, and am stumped here.

Thanks for any help!

     Mark