I recently ran into a HDD error...

[immranderson]

well, my laptop booted into ubuntu one day but then I thought it was running really slow and clunky so i reset my laptop and I ran into a HDD failure...

So, I was wondering if I could do a full reinstall of ubuntu? Thing is, It doesn't pick up my CD right away -- and I think i'd need to boot it through GRUB, but I have absolutely no clue how to do this!

This is my last ditch effort before I go out and buy a new HDD

[wpshooter]

What do you mean "it doesn't pick up my CD right away" ?

Do you have anything on this computer that you need to save ?

If not then get and use http://www.killdisk.com to completely WIPE the hard drive and then reinstall the O/S.

Good luck.

[tommcd]

well, my laptop booted into ubuntu one day but then I thought it was running really slow and clunky so i reset my laptop and I ran into a HDD failure...

So, I was wondering if I could do a full reinstall of ubuntu? Thing is, It doesn't pick up my CD right away -- and I think i'd need to boot it through GRUB, but I have absolutely no clue how to do this!

This is my last ditch effort before I go out and buy a new HDD

What kind of hard drive failure? If you know the manufacturer of the hard drive perhaps you can download a utility to check the drive for problems from the manufacturers website.
To reinstall you just set the computers BIOS to boot from the cdrom drive and reinstall. You don't need to boot with grub to reinstall. Hardy final will be out in 2 days, so perhaps this is a good time to reinstall anyway.

[Pumalite]

You can check your HDD with TestDisk: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
To reformatt your HDD use Gparted Live CD:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php
To save and restore:
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p13.htm#overall_plan
http://restore.holonyx.com/
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=564836
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p13.htm
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/partimage
http://web2linux.blogspot.com/2007/11/apples-time-machine-now-for-linux.html
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/disk-archive-backup-and-restore-using-dar-and-kdardar-frontend.html
http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/Features.html

[potatoguy123]

I would reinstall ubuntu.