Upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

I installed Ubuntu 9.10.  In April 2010, System > Administration > Update Manager gave me the option of upgrading to 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).  I went with this option in May.  Shortly after starting the upgrade, I got this message:

Third party sources disabled

Some third party entries in your source list were disabled.  You can re-enable them after the upgrade with the 'software-properties' tool or your package manager.

I went ahead with the upgrade.   Next, I got this message:

Support for some applications ended.

Canonical Ltd. no longer provides support for the following software packages.  You can still get support from the community.

The community was the only place I had ever gotten support anyway, so that was fine.  I started the process, and I got an indication that the upgrade would be upgrading 1500 files, and it would take nearly an hour.  I went with that.  Next, it asked me where I wanted to install grub-pc.  I had two partitions on a hard drive, one for Windows XP programs, and one for Ubuntu, so (following the advice in the yellow pop-up) I selected both of those, but not the hard drive itself.  I had data partitions on another drive, and didn't install grub-pc to any of those.  Then I got a question about removing obsolete packages, and I affirmed that.  It installed more stuff and then wanted to reboot.  When it did, it got this far:

GRUB loading.

error: the symbol 'grub_puts_' not found

grub rescue>

To fix this, following the advice of Vanishing, I inserted an Ubuntu CD, punched the reset button on the computer, and when I got a menu, I looked for the "Rescue a broken system" option.  I didn't see one, so I checked and found this was an option on the Alternative CD.  I didn't seem to have one for a recent version of Ubuntu, so I downloaded the ISO on another computer, burned it to CD, and booted from that.  I worked my way around to an option to "Reinstall GRUB boot loader."  I tried doing that to /dev/sda.  Then I rebooted.  This time, it went OK.  Now I saw one reason why it might not have been working right before.  It said this:

The disk drive for /media/DAILY is not ready yet or not present

Continue to wait; or Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery

DAILY was my external USB hard drive.  I think I must have had an entry for it in /etc/fstab in the previous installation.  I pressed S to skip it.  It went through various updates (to Firefox, VMware, etc.).  Then it was done.  I wanted to make some changes to the installation, but that would be the subject of a separate post.