Installed, but now I'm stuck HELP!!!!!!!!

[l3acklash]

Hey guys,
Look, I am the newest of the new to come to Ubuntu. I have drooled over ubuntu for YEARS, Just never really got around to doing anything with it. Anyways. I just recently installed ubuntu 12.04. It was working GREAT! well.. up until i rebooted my machine. Now im confused and don't know where to go. I would greatly appreciate any help that can be given.

Anyways, whenever I turn the machine on now, it wont detect my disk drive and sends me straight to this purple "GNU GRUB" screen (and yes i have gone through the bios and selected the disk drive to be my main boot drive.. still nothing)

Heres a direct overlay of what im dealing with when at the purple "GNU GRUB" screen:

GNU GRUB
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-23- generic-pae
Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-23- generic-pae (recovery mode)
Memory test (memtest86+)
Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Instinctively I select the first "Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-23- generic-pae. That sends me to this command window:

mount: mounting /dev/disk/by-uuid/8ef68434-a383-41a0-bfb2-0e491648ca3a on /root
failed: Invalid argument
mount: mounting /dev on /root/dev failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory
Target filesystem doesn't have requested /sbin/init
No init found. Try pressing init= bootarg

BusyBox v1.18.5 (Ubuntu 1:1.18.5-1ubuntu4) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs)

[darkod]

Double check in BIOS if your disk is recognized correctly there or not. I am not talking about the device boot order, look whether the actual disk is recognized. If it doesn't exist in BIOS, it's like it's not there so there is nothing to boot.

If the disk is correctly in BIOS, when the grub2 boot menu shows, try pressing 'c' for command mode. At the prompt execute:

ls

Does that list the disk and partitions like (hd0),(hd0,1),(hd0,2), etc?

[l3acklash]

Thanks for trying to help, but i still don't understand what your talking about. My disk drive is located in the bios. And in the command prompt I typed in Code: gave me the error of "invalid command prompt"

Can you walk me through step by step?

[l3acklash]

Also, your image of the Code that im sopposed to type in isnt showing up. just says "is"

[darkod]

That is the command you need to type, just two letters. The smallcase LS, it's not is, it's ls.

[arpanaut]

No it is a ls small L
as in list.

oops, too slow

[l3acklash]

oh ahaha my bad Thanks for clearing that up. Yeah this is what i got:

grub> ls
(hd0) (hd0,msdos5) (hd0,msdos1)

[darkod]

OK. At that grub> prompt run these commands one by one and see if that boots it:

insmod part_msdos
insmod ext2
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
linux vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1
initrd initrd.img
boot

If that works, we can try sorting out grub2.

[l3acklash]

everything works up until the:

linux vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1

Command prompt, says: invalid filename "vmlinuz"

[darkod]

OK. Lets see what kernels do you have. If you can, copy paste, or write down, the output of:

ls (hd0,msdos1)/boot

That should show all kernels present in the /boot folder. We need to see what's there so that we know what to try to boot.