[SOLVED] Major Ubuntu and grub boot problems

[shortylonglegs]

I really need help, I am working on a final project for calculus due tomorrow and my computer won't work. I was working with openoffice spreadsheet and had firefox open to pandora.com. I plugged in my flashdive and tried to open a file from it in openoffice. The music suddenly stopped and the system didn't respond to anything. I had to do a hard reboot, and when I did all that comes up is an error about the OS not loading. Usually it goes to grub, because I dual boot with XP, but not even grub came up. I tried using my live CD to run fsck, because that worked before, but nothing happens now:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fsck -V /dev/sda3
fsck 1.40.8 (13-Mar-2008)
[/sbin/fsck.ext3 (1) -- /dev/sda3] fsck.ext3 /dev/sda3
e2fsck 1.40.8 (13-Mar-2008)
/dev/sda3: clean, 156194/612000 files, 964035/2441880 blocks (check in 5 mounts)

I urgently need to finish this project and can't effectivly do it from this live CD.

[Bakon Jarser]

Try this.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351

[Jose Catre-Vandis]

What exactly is the first error on boot (where you are expecting grub) ?

Perhaps try a forced fsck line:

(sudo) e2fsck -f /dev/sda3

or a more detailed one
e2fsck -C0 -p -f -v /dev/sda3

Could also be that grub is in a mess. Try re setting grub using live CD:
Open terminal
sudo grub
find /boot/grub/stage1
root (hd?,?) <- as found in above
setup (hd?)
quit
reboot

[shortylonglegs]

Thanks so much for the prompt replies, that worked.
Saved me a lot of effort and panic.