Hi, this is my first message in this forum, I've been an Ubunutu user for over 9 months now, and having liked it so much, I had been using it as my sole OS. Recently I upraded from Edgy Eft to Feisty Fawn and somehow the upgrade didn't go right. Either for this reason or for some other, my laptop now just won't boot.

My suspicion is that the kernel got corrupted somehow. My first thought was to use the distro cd to repair it, but unlike a Windows CD the Ubuntu distro does not have that option (or I couldn't see it). Booting directly from the CD, I am unable to access the hard drive to either repair the previous installation or just access my dearly needed files. I'd really be grateful for any help or advice.

Thanks in advance.

That doesn't sound good.
When you boot the CD, are you in the liveCD environment (i.e. the Ubuntu GUI) ???.
And you can't see the disk ???. Ugh.

Open a terminal and post (all) the output from(that's a lower case ell, as in list)

Edit: Forgot about Ubuntu needing sudo for this.

Thanks for coming to the rescue! Sorry for the delay, I had to hand write all of the info and bring it to this computer.
You're right, when I boot from the CD I am in the live CD environment. If I go to places and computer, I can see the CD drive and the hard drive but I cannot access the hard drive it says "unable to mount the selected volume" and in details:
error: device /dev/hdal is not removable
error: could not execute pmount


after doing sudo fdisk I get the following output:

Device Boot start end Blocks Id System
/dev//hda1 * 1 2339 18787986 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 2340 2432 7470022+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 2340 2432 746991 82 Linux swap/solaris

I'm surprised the liveCD mode doesn't get you a Internet connection. I use Knoppix typically, then I can hit the net directly from the problem system.

Hopefully that error message actually said hda1 (one, not ell). Regardless you have a problem.
Does the liveCD recognise USB insertion ??? - hopefully you can copy your data off to there.
Try the following on the liveCD to see your dataHopefully you should be able to see your data via Nautilus or whatever. If not, from that terminal try (no quotes) "ls /media/tempry", then descend appropriate levels; say "ls /media/tempry/home", then "ls /media/tempry/home/<your user name here>"

thanks, let me try this

Thanks, I just accessed my files. This is great. I can't access all the files but at least I got most of it.

Can I bother you a bit further and ask if and how I can replace my corrupt OS without losing everything? Or is it better that I just start fresh?

With the GUI installers Ubuntu use I doubt it - maybe if you used the alternate CD. But again I doubt it. You could try a re-install without formatting any partitions.

If it were me I'd create a /home partition (as I always do), and copy all the current /home there. Then try the install again from the start. If you use the same username (and don't allow it to format that partition) it should offer to keep the user specific stuff. Does on an upgrade.