Every Ubuntu installation since Ubuntu 9.10 installs Grub2 by default. In many ways this is great - Grub2 has a number of new features, and has become more portable and modular than older versions of Grub. The catch is, if you don’t need the new features that it provides, it can make life much harder if you ever need to configure grub. My system has often been inconsistent in the way it refers to its hard drives, which means if my hardware configuration changes at all, I have to boot into a live CD/USB to fix the Grub configuration to refer to the correct drive.

With Grub 1.5, all that was required to fix Grub was a live OS that could mount the root (or boot) drive, and had a text editor. With Grub2, on the other hand, you must mount the root (and boot if necessary) partition(s) and then chroot into the root partition. Having done this, you then edit the /etc/grub/default file to reflect the update of your drive (a change that is hard to get through simple experimentation, unlike in the earlier version’s setup) and then run update grub. Seems like an awful lot of work if you aren’t using the extra features that Grub2 provides (and I’m not).

In short, I understand why you should use Grub2 - I just don’t like it.