I appreciate the help, but neither of your weapons work for me. My computer would not recognize a CD and let me boot from it--I tried with an old 11.4 disc I still had. My ubuntu won't load, and I keep meaning to reinstall, but, for some reason, I don't get around to it.
But the GOOD news is that I found a solution:
(1) ls: this gives you a list of what your computer thinks it has on it. Even though I have a Windows partition, I did not see any partition labeled as msdos. If you do, it's probably Windows. I only had numbers, and not even all consecutive numbers: I had (hd0), (hd0,1), up through (hd0,8) but without (hd0,2) or (hd0,7). I have no idea why.
(2) try ls on each partition, eg. . Ideally, you get one that stands out. For me, the difference between the responses changed from "does not exist" to "unknown format" for two partitions. One of the two "unknown format" partitions allowed me to get back to Windows. (Also, the lack of a space after the comma is important. You want exactly (hd0,X).)
(3) use the following commands, with X as your partition:
Code:
set root=(hd0,X)
set prefix=(hd0,X)/boot/grub
insmod normal
normal
Unfortunately, step (3) is when you find out that you picked the wrong partition in step (2). For me, "insmod" was declared to not exist. If that happens, I guess you try another partition? That doesn't seem to cause any harm, so you can try this with every listed partition until one works. I broke my Ubuntu installation by downloading the install instead of doing a clean install, but I imagine that this would still work, because I wasn't booted directly into Windows--I got the list of OSs on my computer and had the ability to choose one of them.
I do not know why all of (3) works, but I'm glad that it does. If someone can shed some light on exactly what "normal" does (I assume it's a program from ubuntu, which means this wouldn't fix the error on a system without an ubuntu partition?), that would be elucidating.
error: unknown filesystem
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