A glitch in the 3.12 merge window

Strange, I had a similar problem with my sid/jessie work computer on Monday/Tuesday this week (Kingston SSDnow + WD 3TB spinning disk). The computer died somehow (powercut, ?, haven't looked at the logs yet...). I came in to work on Tuesday to discover that it tried to reboot, and grub came back with a message something like 'ELF header size too small'. I could only use a few modules, and those didn't include file system ones.

I needed to re-install grub on the boot sector (using another computer), then had a long wait for the XFS partition on the other drive to mount (presumably due to unfinished writes). After another full upgrade, I reinstalled grub again using the work computer and things seem to (so far) be working fine.

I've got somewhat used to this happening with sid upgrades. About once every couple of years something happens that needs a rescue CD -- this was one of those times.