How do I manually boot from the grub prompt after do-release-upgrade?

After looking at jdehaan's post, I checked out a machine with a similiar configuration. Going off another box's grub.cfg, I used the following commands to get this thing to boot:

recordfail
insmod ext2
set root='(hd0,1)'
linux /vmlinuz-2.6.32-server root=/dev/mapper/SS928-root ro quiet
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.32.30-server
boot

I suppose the next step is figuring out how to replace the grub.cfg on this machine now.

I had the same issue and could solve the problem by specifying

linux /boot/vmlinuz.... root=/dev/sda1

So /dev/sda1 (or what will match on your system) instead of the SS... The rest of your posts was kept alike during my tries.

If you have a working grub config somewhere, ls at the root level lists partitions, and configfile (boot device)/path/to/grub.config lets you boot your grub config.