Partitioning problems

[Honeypig]

Hi all,

As a noob, I apologies in advance for daft questions...

I sucessfully installed Ubuntu onto an old XP machine (single boot, removing all the XP data and using all the space for Ubuntu). They say that curiosity kills the cat, well it may well have killed my PC! I had been happily getting to know Ubuntu and getting on pretty well but I thought I'd see what a KDE desktop version would look like. I happened to have a Kubuntu live CD to havd so thought I'd go for a live session to check it out. Like it but now want to go back to regular ubuntu but it seems to have dome somethng to the boot load order / grub menu (not sure about all this by the way):confused:.

When I try to bot up it says to install a valid boot data into the selected boot device. Now I went into the BIOS settings and changed the boot order back to HDD forst, but it doesn't work... I thought a poss solution could be just to reinstall (as I seem to be able to boot from the DVD drive OK). All going well untill I get to the but of the installation 'prepare partitions'. Blank list and cammot press any of the buttons.

My guess is that I have deleted the old partition or something and screwed up the machine totally.:(

Any ideas would be great.

Thanks,

[realzippy]

Does the bios "see" your harddisc?
Partitioning tool should see your partitions or empty space if you really had deleted it...if it sees nothing,check the HD connections
(Data and Power Cable)..

[Honeypig]

Sometimes the bios sees the harddisk, and sometimes it doesnt. I'll see if the cables have come loose (but I'd be surprised, as I've never taken tha case off this machine, and havent moved it since it last worked fine. It seems like using the kububtu live CD changed something

[realzippy]

...the liveCD should not do any harm...
If the error still occurs after you checked cables you can try to unplug the cdrom completely and see if HD is still found randomly,,