Hi everyone!

First off, yes I have searched this and I usually know how to fix it. But, all the solutions I've come across require booting from the Live CD.

Here's my problem. I dual-boot Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with Ubuntu 11.04 x64. I wanted to try out Linux Mint, so I tried installing it from their DVD (torrented the ISO, burned to DVD). However, I had forgotten to check the MD5 sum before I burned the iso, and since I had torrented the file, some pieces weren't correct. So, during the installation the inevitable happened, the installer crashed. Gave me an error about the disc being wrong or the CD drive not working. I know it's not my CD drive, it's been working fine with everything else. When I turn on my computer, it gives me an error saying "error: file not found." and then the grub rescue prompt.

So, I tried booting up to the Live CD again and I can't get to boot anything from a CDROM. I can't boot the Windows 7 CD, the Ubuntu CD, OR the Mint CD. Nothing will boot, even though I made sure everything is correct.

When I choose to boot from a CD, my BIOS loads up, then comes up with "Boot from CD/DVD: ", then waits for a bit then goes straight to the grub rescue prompt. This is obviously where it should run from the CD, but it doesn't. I've tried dozens of times and this is getting really annoying.

I haven't tried booting from USB, I've never done this and I don't really know how. Also, my BIOS has several options for booting from USB and I don't know which one will work.

Thanks!

On first sight , grub had overwritten the MBR of the HD already .
The grub shell offers several commands , which have changed from grub1 to grub2 .

Grub1 commands to check for anything would be "geometry hd0" or "find (hd0,1)/boot" .

Puppy linux is a small distro that boots from USB . You can boot the liveCD with a second computer and use one of the two or three install-scripts that show in the Main-Menu to install to USB .