Comment 3 for bug 657871

I had exactly the same problem, just after upgrading from 10.04 to 10.10, and the workaround described in the initial report works for me, that is modifying file /etc/grub.d/00_header by replacing the if fi block by the line set timeout=10.

Interestingly enough, the same code was in the original file "/etc/grub.d/00_header" in version 10.04, but it looks that the upgrade affected something that makes "recordfail" variable to be empty when these lines of code are reached.