it was a normal apt-upgrade that provided the link, though I did download it with wget instead of apt since apt wasn't working for some reason(kept stalling out, less than x data in last 120 seconds).
However, I just put it in the apt cache folder and it found it. I supposed it could have gotten corrupted at some point but I'm not sure how.
trying the options in your second post sadly gives me only: "Ramdisk image is corrupt or invalid"
I also tried the same thing with the "4.4.153-mvebu" kernel, but got the same result.
Something must have gotten really screwed up somewhere, but I have no idea what or how.
I'm not at my linux laptop at the moment, so I'll have to try checking the symlinks with ls later.
Thank you very much for your help so far. Maybe I just need to reinstall and then blacklist that upgrade or pin the kernel version.