Help! Disk boot failure.

[pondering-panda]

Hi. I'm fairly new to Ubuntu and Linux in general, but have been running a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit on my desktop for about 6 months. Yesterday the machine crashed would not shut down by any means and I was ultimately forced to unplug it.

Upon restarting I was presented with

CLIENT MAC ADDRESS: ** ** ** ** ** ** GUID *********-****-****-****-************
DHCP ......

followed by

PXE-E53: No boot filename recieved

PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

I have checked the bios boot priorities and they seem fine.

After having searched around the internet for a bit I think that the grub loader (?) is missing/not installed/unavailable. I tried to reinstall it via booting Ubuntu from CD, but I can't seem to mount my hard disk.

This leads me to the conclusion that my HDD is knackered, which is a surprise considering its only 6 months old.

Any help would be greatly recieved. Thanks in advance.

[pondering-panda]

UPDATE: Tried a fresh install of Ubuntu and no partition was apparrent for me to install anything to.

So probabbly one dead hard disk.

[ajgreeny]

Sounds suspiciously like it, I agree, but before you give up completely, from the live CD try

sudo fdisk -l

to see if that finds a disk and partitions, or run gparted and see what that finds. I am not sure if the live CD includes the Disk Utility in the System->Administration menu, but if it does, use that as well.

Probably will not help, but you never know!

[pondering-panda]

fdisk produced nothing at all

ie:

ubuntu@ubuntu:/$ sudo fdisk -l
ubuntu@ubuntu:/$

gparted is on the live CD and this too found absolutely nothing.

So, yeah. Looks pretty dead.

Thanks for your help though.