10.10 uninstalling wubi killed me

[mobabur94]

heres what happenned:
1. had working xp install on 320 gb hard disk with only one partition.
2. backed up and used easeus to shrink and create new partition on same hard drive.
3. tried to install from a working live cd but got medium not found error.
4. looked for fix but didnt find it so i used wubi to install it to the partition i created.
5. worked but annoyingly slow so looked for guide to switch from wubi to full install.
6. followed guide and it installed to a new partition i made with gparted and it formatted that one to ext4 but i still had the wubi install which i didnt want. (btw, non-wubi is much > wubi install).
7. went to xp to uninstall wubi, delete wubi partition, and grow full ubuntu install partition with easeus. easeus requires reboot.
8. restart comp to find an error that said no partition found and something else about grub rescue.
9. try live cds but hard drive not detected and tried win7 and xp but they didnt even get into setup
10. make plan: get bro to format my hardd disk using his compyter so i csn try ubuntu onw more time

i got a bunch of different types of errors but im really close to giving up on it entirely.

anyone have any suggestions to help me get my hard disk recognized by ubuntu so i can install it?

thanks.

[thesavager]

Do you have an Live-cd lying around from knoppix or an older Ubuntu version ?
they give you the possibility to boot an operating-system that's already installed, even if Grub is broken .... after you booted into Ubuntu ... from there you can repair your master-boot record with Grub.

Let me know if you have a Live-cd and you can boot into Ubuntu .... from there we can continue.. to repair your master-boot record with Grub.

[mobabur94]

Do you have an Live-cd lying around from knoppix or an older Ubuntu version ?
they give you the possibility to boot an operating-system that's already installed, even if Grub is broken .... after you booted into Ubuntu ... from there you can repair your master-boot record with Grub.

Let me know if you have a Live-cd and you can boot into Ubuntu .... from there we can continue.. to repair your master-boot record with Grub.

ok i got into backtrack 4 final live cd but i can't connect to google for some reason. im using a wired connection. anyways,
i created folders: /one and /two.
then i mounted /dev/sda1 to /one and /dev/sda2 to two and all my stuff is still there.
then i think i remember seeing a screenshot of someone typing "update-grub" so i tried that and i think it worked because there were no errors but im not even sure what update grub really does.
i havent rebooted because im not sure if it will work and i wanted to know what to do next.
if i need to be connected to the web, then i have no clue how because in ubuntu it worked fine but it doent work in backtrack 4.
im using backtrack 4 because my brother threw away our old ubuntus and the only other live cds i have are parted magic 5.10 and open suse 11.3.

anyways i appreciate you helping me. what should i do next? is there a way to fix the boot loader from inside backtrack 4, or do i need to do other things first? thanks

EDIT: I am now on BT4 Final and I got the internet to work. It was really simple; I just needed to type "ifconfig -a" then "ifconfig eth1 up". Thank god because I was starting to hate the Safari mobile browser. Anyways, I'm still not sure if I should reboot. I don't think it is fixed yet so I'll just wait.

[mobabur94]

Anyone else know what I should do next?

EDIT: I'm going to reboot.

[mobabur94]

OK, nothing changed.

My new plan:
Format my drive completely and install Ubuntu 10.10 on it.

Three Problems:
1. I am not sure if it will work because right now, if I try to boot the Ubuntu 10.10 Live CD, I get:


Unable to find a medium containing a live file system.

2. I would just boot into a Windows XP CD and just un-partition everything there but when I try to boot into my XP CD or onto my hard drive, I get something like:


error: file not found
grub rescue>

3. I only have a few Live CDs and the only one that works is Backtrack 4 Final in forensics mode which I'm in right now.

So, I searched and could not find how to format my hard drive in a BT4 Live CD. Does anyone know how to do this? Please explain it like I'm five years old because I'm a beginner. Thanks.

EDIT: I found GParted but I'm not sure If I should do it. Does anyone know how I can fix my GRUB stuff so that I don't have to completely reinstall everything?

[mobabur94]

OK whatever. I just formatted it all to one ext3 partition. Hopefully this will let the Ubuntu Live CD install. If it doesn't, I'll try it on a USB. If that doesn't work either, Then I'll have to stitch it back to NTFS and try to get Windows 7 or XP on. God this was such a bad experience. What makes it worse is that only one person replied...

[wilee-nilee]

So Ubuntu generally installs in a ext4 partition these days, an ext3 will work though.

If you want to install Ubuntu you will need a Ubuntu cd that boots, always just burn the downloaded ISO as an image, not a data file. In windows if you have a burner it generally is a right click and burn to cd.

Additionally you should post a screen shot of gparted and state your goals. We want to make sure your on the right track, and that you understand partitioning limitations as well.

[mobabur94]

So Ubuntu generally installs in a ext4 partition these days, an ext3 will work though.

If you want to install Ubuntu you will need a Ubuntu cd that boots, always just burn the downloaded ISO as an image, not a data file. In windows if you have a burner it generally is a right click and burn to cd.

Additionally you should post a screen shot of gparted and state your goals. We want to make sure your on the right track, and that you understand partitioning limitations as well.

Thanks for the reply. The CD worked on my brothers computer and I used InfraRecorder to burn it. I also made sure the MD5 was right.

I was looking for the ext4 option in GParted but it wasn't there so that is why I used ext3. Anyways, it gave me the same error as before.

I tried the USB next. It didn't even boot. I used UNetbootin and I configured my BIOS to boot from USB. I even tried it on a different USB. I tried them as both NTFS and FAT32.

Now I'm in BT4 again and I deleted the ext3 partition. I'm going to try it one more time from the Live CD with the whole hard drive unpartitioned. If you want a screenshot of GParted, here: http://i.imgur.com/JcBj6.png

If that doesn't work, I'll try Win7 or XP again...

[thesavager]

mobabur , sorry mate ...I couldn't response on your comments ... i had a lot to do at work.

The most common problem with the Live-cd's is that they need to get burned on cd with the slowest speed possible.... sometimes people forget this, and end up with a broken install !!

I've seen your screenshot , and that is the best way to start ... a complete empty harddrive ...without any partitions. However installing besides Windows is also possible.

I don't get email when someone makes a response on this topic, so i have to check it myself .... else email me when you have problems again.
regards Pascal