I have a dual OS installed with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.04 and it was working up until just now. I ran the windows disk partitioner and it seems to have screwed everything up. I get that very special grub rescue when I try to boot and I have tried reinstalling grub as a result but to no success. I have done run the sudo grub-install and have had it successfully work when I used --force, but it still won't run grub. Another thing is that when I tried to just rerun the ubuntu 11.04 install it didn't recognize any partitions on my system at all. My guess is that is because grub is faulty and so therefore it can not recognize my partitions. In the command line from my live disk fdisk does not recognize the partitions and cfdisk has fatal error. The only thing I can get to find my partitions is by using sudo blkid.

Seriously, I have looked everywhere and I seem to have a combination of many peoples other problems so any help here would be greatly appreciated. I would love to get back to using my computer and seeing my Emma Watson wallpaper

The first thing that may help us is from terminal using ubuntu disk as a live cd run command

sudo fdisk -l (small L) and post results here.

This will show the partitions on your h/d.

Hey Larry,
I get "Unable to seek on /dev/sda" when I run that. It's as I was saying, the only way I can see my old partitions is if I do "sudo blkid" then I get:

/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/sda1: LABEL="TOSHIBA SYSTEM VOLUME" UUID="01CC0DCF71454C20" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda3: LABEL="SQ004817V03" UUID="01CC0828F35575C0" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda5: UUID="9f906192-ec81-479f-a3ab-0bb225f313fb" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda6: UUID="fd9a2f45-9407-4246-a206-09a229a03ed8" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sda7: UUID="c259065c-b317-45e7-b4a6-0b5ea1667bd0" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sdc1: LABEL="PENDRIVE" UUID="0AEC-161C" TYPE="vfat"

thanks

Did you convert your harddisk from the basic disk into a dynamic disk? That would be an explanation to your issue.

If I did, I didn't do it intentionally... So should I convert back to a basic disk, and if so how do I do that?

If you did there is no way to convert it back, besides a reinstall of all your systems on a fresh partitioned disk. But before doing that you should open the Windows partitioner and have a look at the disk, if that is really the case.
May be I am just plain wrong here.

Unless Ubuntu changed on 11.04, Grub would be irrelevant using an installation CD because it boots with isolinux. Have you checked with the Install CD to see if GParted shows anything? Click on the System tab (I think) to find GParted.

What were you trying to accomplish with the windows disk partitioner?
How did you try to re-install Grub, commands you used? From the CD?
Do you get any output in the terminal from the command: df -h?

When I run GParted I get two partitions. The one that originally came on my Toshiba laptop (small <3 gb) and one other ntfs partition that takes up the rest of my hard drive. That last partition also has an exclamation point warning next to it saying to use chkdsk in windows but I don't know how to do that if I cannot boot up. I used to have 5 or so partitions, one windows, one toshiba, one for ubuntu, and two swap partitions. I was using the windows disk partitioner because there was an unused partition just sitting there so I thought I would utilize that extra space for my windows partition.

This is what I get when I do df -h:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
aufs 1.5G 142M 1.3G 10% /
none 1.5G 704K 1.5G 1% /dev
/dev/sdc1 1.9G 685M 1.3G 36% /cdrom
/dev/loop0 658M 658M 0 100% /rofs
none 1.5G 240K 1.5G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 1.5G 36K 1.5G 1% /tmp
none 1.5G 128K 1.5G 1% /var/run
none 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /var/lock
/dev/sda1 1.1G 883M 184M 83% /mnt

Alright, for anyone with similar problems here's how I fixed it!

I ran this super awesome program in my ubuntu live cd. The program is a terminal based application called testdisk and when you run the app it shows all of the old partitions that used to exist recently and their starts and stops on the hard disk. From there you can piece together which of your old partitions existed and restore them back to where they used to be. You can just google testdisk to get its tarball and how to unload and run it, it isn't too difficult, and the wiki on it explains how to use it once opened.

LESSON LEARNED: Never use a windows based partitioner because it does not like other non-ntfs partitions!

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