Comment 12 for bug 441941

I too have an HP nc6400.
Before I read PeterF's post I tried to replace GRUB2 with GRUB which works without losing (whatever utility is provided by )HP protecttools or recovery manager.

I went into Synaptic and marked grub 2 for deletion (I WAS worried that grub wasn't an option) but went ahead anyway.

Unfortunately the GNU GRUB-Legacy doesn't have debs or rpms but only source code tarballs but the source won't complile (dependency on binutils_2.9 or later fails because Ubuntu has binutils_2.20 - the old ASCII ordering which caused so much angst with Mandrake 8 all those years ago is still alive and kicking)

Fortunately, after refreshing the archives grub 0.97 appeared alongside grub 2 so the solution is

open synaptic
delete grub 2
refresh archives (if necessary to show grub)
install grub
open a terminal and type sudo update-grub

and everything works without fiddling with the HP utilities.

So far I've booted in and out of Ubuntu and Windows 3 times without problem