All good, my theory. If you really wanted to check you could 'uname -r' and compare the kernel you get with the final kernel update for 11.04.
FYI, Grub was always installed. But, when Grub detects only one OS, it doesn't show you a boot menu. (Unless you hold down the "Shift" key I believe - think that still works.) But if a 2nd OS like Windows is detected, then it shows you a menu.
What probably happened is that originally, Grub didn't detect Windows. Hard drive not connected? Or something like that. But an update ran the "update-grub" command that detected Windows 7, so it added it to the boot menu and started showing the menu upon startup.
Those were the last updates for 11.04 that you never installed before. For the moment, the repository servers are still active, but at some point they will be shut off. I found this out with an old 10.10 installation I don't use for much. I tried to install something and found that all of the source links in my repository were now broken. The same will surely happen soon enough with 11.04.
Nice explanation ahallubuntu, I just want to add a comment.
@cybrsaylr
You happened to actually have the kind of setup I 'Recommend' for people having more than one drive and multiple OS. That is - each hard disk having its own OS and bootloader. Then it is usually just a matter of hitting a key (like F12 in your case) during boot-up to choose between desired drives to boot their own OS.
This ensures that the system remains bootable if any of the drives or the OS on them fails.
However, a grub update in ubuntu has the tendency to install grub boot-loader on the drive which it 'sees' as the 'first' drive. So I recommend to set the Ubuntu drive as the 'first' one in BIOS so the windows boot loader doesn't get accidently overwritten during a grub update. To be extra sure, I even advise to 'remove' the other drive(s) while installing OS on one drive.
In this case, a grub update detects the other OS on the other drive > includes it in its menu to be presented on the next boot, but doesn't touch the boot loader on the other drive. So even if you remove the Ubuntu drive later, the system is able to boot from the other drive using its own boot loader and pertaining OS.
Hope I didn't confuse you.
Cheers!
Not confusing at all varunendra.
In fact we discussed this in this tread, along with a way to keep GRUB from updating if you prefer using F12 or whatever for selecting which OS to boot.
In post #7 darkod explains how to do this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2097492
Ubuntu 20.04.06 LTS 64bit Ext4 on a Dell Studio XPS Desktop Intel® Core™ i7-860 2.8GHz, 8GB DDR3 ram
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