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Users of GRUB legacy, which is version 0.97, are getting bitten by an e2fsprogs incompatibility that renders their systems unbootable. e2fsprogs is the utilities package for the Ext3 filesystem, so it doesn't affect other filesystems. As this Ubuntu bug report states:

"e2fsprogs ≥ 1.40.5 creates ext3 filesystems with 256 byte large inodes by default (in contrast to 128 byte used before), to accommodate for further ext4 related changes... Using any of these new features requires updating the bootsector of your system. Bootsectors written by "grub or earlier versions of "grub-gfxboot" are not able to boot or even access partitions using any of these new features!

The GRUB maintainers are devoting their energies to GRUB 2 and have put GRUB legacy into a feature freeze, which means they're not accepting bug reports and won't fix this particular issue. Leaving the aside the whole question of who to blame, which can be fun but is really a waste of time, why did this particular problem emerge in the first place? Why do we even need 256-byte inodes? To support new features in Ext4 such as faster fscks, extended attributes stored in inodes, inode versioning, and nanosecond timestamps. Storing extended attributes in the inodes results in significantly faster performance with any application that uses ACLs (Access Control Lists) or EAs, such as SELinux. Putting 256-byte inodes in Ext3 provides a direct migration path to Ext4; the alternative is to create new Ext4 filesystems and copy your old files over.

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