Comment 9 for bug 470490

Bug #470265 is an exceptional case where the user's /etc/kernel-img.conf is missing the hooks that are supposed to be set up as part of every install. So far, that bug has been unreproducible for anyone else.

The usual cause for the problem you're seeing is that you have manually edited your menu.lst, then on upgrade you've answered when prompted that you want to keep these local changes instead of letting update-grub overwrite them. Is this the case for you?

If so, please review the changes you've made to your menu.lst and apply them to the "Default options" section of variables in menu.lst, as documented in the same file; then run 'sudo update-grub' and choose "install the package maintainer's version" instead of the default "keep the local version currently installed".

We're vigilant for any failures to configure the correct kernel on upgrade resulting from other than an explicit user decision, but aside from the one odd and unreproducible case you've pointed to, so far we're not aware of any. I sympathize with users who find themselves in this situation unexpectedly, but that prompt on upgrade - and the default value f "keep the local version" - are there precisely because in previous versions of Ubuntu, local changes to menu.lst would be lost without warning. There's little we can do to improve this further without scrapping the menu.lst format entirely... which is exactly what we're doing by switching to grub2 by default for new installs in Ubuntu 9.10.

Since this problem seems to be affecting a surprising number of users for Ubuntu 9.10, I'll be adding a note about this to the Ubuntu release notes. We will also look at whether the text of the prompt can be clarified without causing a regression for non-English-speaking users.