Comment 93 for bug 576724

@ Alex Cockell,

Sorry to take so long but I've had precious little time to spend at my desk. First of all regarding this, "the only option being to send it back to the vendor to fix it", if you don't have any Ubuntu Live media that might be true but you really should have Live Media that will work with both your Thinkpad and Ideapad.

I'm guessing the Thinkpad has an optical drive but the Ideapad most likely does not (unless you have a USB optical drive), so Live USB may be best for you. If you're unsure what to do to create Live Media you could look at these wikis:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LiveUsbPendrivePersistent

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD

Regardless you should always have Live media before performing an upgrade because things can "break", and not just grub. But a better place to raise these kinds of questions would be Ubuntu Forums:

http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=333

Regarding the upgrade from Hardy to Lucid (10.04.1 which is scheduled for release around 08/12) I'm reasonably sure that the upgrade will still leave you with legacy grub so you might encounter this problem:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidLynx/ReleaseNotes#GRUB%20menu.lst:%20install%20the%20maintainer%27s%20version%20vs.%20keep%20the%20local%20version

I'll probably be involved in the 10.04.1 upgrade testing around the 9th or 10th so you might want to follow the progress on that other bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub/+bug/470490

All that said this particular bug should not effect you in any way with an upgrade from 8.04 to 10.04 because it will retain legacy grub, but IMHO you should always be prepared for the worst when doing a distro upgrade, 90% of the time everything will go just fine but you must have Live media just in case.