Thinkpad T60P: bricked by grub transition

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

I'm writing to this address since I'm not sure what else to do.

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T60P which until this evening happily ran
Debian testing, with two kernels available at the boot-menu: a version
of 2.6.29 with the rt patches applied, compiled with the Debian kernel
tools, and one stock Debian kernel (2.6.26).

The machine was set up in a maximally simple way. Debian is the only
OS that has ever been on it (I bought it as one of the `linux-ready'
laptops from Lenovo and installed Debian as soon as it arrived); it
has always worked beautifully.

Upon a recent routine upgrade (against current testing), I read the
debconf messages about the transition from grub-legacy to grub2, and
thought that I should try grub2 as I was encouraged to do.

I installed the package from today's testing (Monday August 3rd). On
the first reboot, I selected

 Chainload into GRUB 2

The reboot went completely fine. I read everything in /usr/share/doc/grub2.
Since the reboot went OK, I ran:

 upgrade-from-grub-legacy

as root, and it completed without error, reporting that it had created
grub.cfg, that it had found two kernel images in /boot and two initrd
images in /boot.

However, when I tried to reboot again, the process got only this far:

   GRUB Loading stage 1.5
   GRUB loading, please wait ... 
   Error 15

And the system is unusable (Ctl-Alt-Delete brings me back to the same
point).

I understand that Error 15 normally or often means that Grub is
looking in the wrong device for the files that it needs in order to
progress on to stage 2 of the boot process, but I don't understand why
grub-legacy was able to do this without every having any difficulty
while grub2 is not, and I don't understand why the upgrade script
wouldn't have ensured that if grub-legacy could find the necessary
files, then grub2 would also find them.

I used a Debian netinstall CD in rescue mode to get back into the
system, re-ran upgrade-from-grub-legacy, and checked various files in
/boot/grub. I've run the grub command-line in an attempt to fix the
thing manually.

I have tried purging grub-pc and reinstalling grub-legacy (using the
installation CD as a rescue-disk) but the system still will not boot
past Error 15.  In fact I've tried everything I can think of and my
T60P which was such a fine machine until this attempted upgrade is
still totally bricked.

If I had to guess, I would stay that the difficulty centers on the
fact that the laptop uses LVM, but again, grub-legacy had no
difficulty coping with this.

I would really appreciate hearing whatever advice might be available
and I will be happy to try to test fixes and post results and so on.

Thank you,

Jim