Canonical ucode bundle bricks my Samsung/Acer-notebooks.

[berry.whitetiger]

I had this trouble too. My whole system mint18.3 will not boot because of an offset-pointer error which confuses the heck out of GRUB. Time shift is useless in this case because it has nothing to do with the file management system The problem occurs before the system post. I'm very reluctant now to install any firmware updates on legacy machines since my last experience broke all of my USB ports, and my internal CD-ROM SATA drive. It has bricked the machine for any new Ubuntu installs. Took me a while to figure out what was going on. I even had to go back, and remove the CMOS battery to flash the ROM from a previous backup. If your using Canonical sw-mgr to update your firmware then good luck. They bundle everything into a single update that includes both INTEL & AMD on the same get.."i.e. "linux-firmware (1.127.24) trusty". It surely will toast your AMD64-A12/K2 notebook.