Shame Ubuntu! (unable to boot Windows after upgrade to 10.04 - Lucid Lynx)

And I say this because I still have higher regards and consequent expectations about products coming from Ubuntu community.

The network based upgrade itself went smooth. Seems like things are messed up with the new GRUB. When I rebooted the PC to boot Windows XP (can we live without one?), GRUB did show Windows as an option to boot. Earlier during the upgrade I had noticed this entry was added as the upgrade process prompted me whether to replace existing copy of

/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Thankfully at the point I had saved a copy of the one being replaced! So, when I selected to boot Windows, all I was shown was a blank screen with a text mode cursor blinking at me infinitely.

Thanks to the active community out there, I realized I'm not alone :-)

• Many talk about this: (and it worked for me!):
  
  
  

  http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/bootinfoscript/index.php?title=Boot_Problems:Boot_Sector

  Found via a thread at Ubuntu Forum.
  Earlier I was not sure about applicability of this to my issue. People claim this solved theirs).
• Online Update to 10.04: loss of Windows Boot. One suggested solution is in post #8.
• Short but laborious, unpredictable solution.
• And finally, the official bug report... (Shame! I expected a better job after all that Microsoft product bashing we have witnessed for so many years).

People say this issue slipped between release candidate and actual production release as they never faced issue during beta testing. That highlights importance of freezing development/ new check-ins before an important milestone.

During this exploration, I discovered some useful tools:

TestDisk (GPL):

TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software, primarily
designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting
disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty
software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as
accidentally deleting a Partition Table).

This tool really did the job for me! And I learned that there exists a backup copy of MBR on the disk. I'm not newbie to OS internals and its programming; but never had chance to deal with gory details of boot record, partition tables, disk geometry, and the likes (yikes! :-) )

CMOSpwd BIOS password recovery from CMOS.