Missing Kernel; formerly a droplet running Ubuntu 12.04

Question

So I have a small droplet which I have been running for years. It’s a LAMP stack on Ubuntu 12.04. It was rebooted due to the spectre/meltdown issue. Anyways, it wasn’t responding and when I checked the droplet through the access console I see that the Digital Ocean Droplet Recovery System is up. I then powered down my server, created a snapshot, and then created a new droplet from the snapshot in order to troubleshoot. With the new droplet setup I have tried going through the recovery system.

I tried first to follow this: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/lost-access-to-sites-servers-and-known-good-backups-won-t-boot. The top response goes through a process of selecting the grubloader, going to shell and rebooting. Didn’t seem to do anything.
Next I selected option 6 (Install a Digital Ocean provided Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Kernel). Again nothing happened.
Filesystem check seems to pass
Install/Update kernel on disk does nothing.

Not sure what else to try here.

gamrtrust · Accepted Answer

So after 30 hours with no help from the DO support I was able to bring back the server back using this method:

Shut down your droplet
Go to the “Kernel” tab and choose the first 12.04 kernel
The kernel will install itself. Now while still offline, choose the “Digitalocean Grubloader v0.2” kernel. So we install first the 12.04 kernel and then switch to the Grubloader v.02, both when the droplet is offline without bringing it back between the installs.
Switch the droplet on
Open the console and type your regular root user and password.

That’s it.

And by the way, digitalocean support sucks. go to hell.