Can anyone verify for me that the "savedefault" option of grub (0.95)
does not work in the current (5.10 - Breezy Badger) distribution?

I am a user of a different Linux distribution, and decided to take on
the task of refurbishing an old (266MHz Pentium) pc for a friend for
use by his daughter, and after searching the internet, I found some
references to users having done this with Ubuntu. Since my friend has
used only Windows, I decided to set it up as a dual boot system, so
that the two of them could ease into using Linux. I thought it would
be a good idea to use the "savedefault" option of grub to have the pc
boot by default to whichever partition was previously booted.
However, this does not seem to work.

I've spent quite some time searching the internet concerning this
problem. It has been reported in the past on Debian forums, but not
extensively. A Debian developers' group reported a fix for the
problem.

I went so far as to install a newer version (0.97-5) of grub (after
spending quite some time learning about deb files, apt-get, synaptic,
etc. - I come from a linux distribution which uses only tarballs for
packages), but still cannot get this to work.

So, before I spend more time on this, has anyone gotten this to work?
I'm confident that my menu.lst file is correct syntactically, and is
configured correctly to allow for this functionality to work (i.e. -
"default saved" option, and "savedefault" for each partition I want to
implement this functionality).

If not, given that the 0.x releases of grub are considered legacy, and
grub 2.x seems to be included in the Debian etch release, I probably
won't spend more time on this.

Thanks in advance.

Joe