Month or so ago I ran into BusyBox, so while reinstalling Ubuntu 10.04 onto to that first FreeBox HD from a live CD, while manually adding & editing a new partition with free space to put Ubuntu into, I must have accidentally edited pre-existing partitions possibly deleting everything off of that HD.

After reinstalling, I went into the terminal & ended up trying to recover or restore the partitions that I thought were lost or deleted or struck sick (since it had BusyBox). But that broke it.






Now, after breaking that first HD of mine, when booting, I run into the following at startup:

error: no such partition.
grub rescue>







Right now, I have that first HD as my slave HD I can no longer find this HD, I can't load into it. It might have died because it was making noises the last several weeks.

But just yesterday when trying to get into this same first HD from Ubuntu, I'd receive this message:


Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

I wrapped the apparent {CODE} in quoted
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox

I'll try at this, though i'm pretty ignorant ;-)
Freebox seems to be a product to which hardware (like a 2nd hdd) can't easily be added

Seems like you think yo installed ubuntu 10.04 over Busybox.
Since you tried recovering busybox partition, i'll guess you did that from ubuntu. So the pc is able to boot into ubuntu.
But in terminal, somehow a grub file was damaged. (this should be grub2)

Also, maybe coincidentally, a 2nd hdd has died. This was the slave drive.

And while in ubuntu, you cannot mount that (dead?) 2nd hdd.

I don't understand whether all of your actions in ubuntu have been from the livecd, or from the ubuntu installed on a hdd (installed on which hdd?)
___
I wonder if it is quickest to wipe the drive (drives?) from the livecd, then do fresh install.
If the slave drive is dead, it may be best to physically remove it, then make sure the remaining master drive has jumper set as single drive.

I recommend you get a live CD, something like:
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

and try to use testdisk to recover the partitions if you messed them up.

As for grub issues, you can tell grub what to boot on the CLI, just type in the commands that would be in the config file. Search for them or maybe:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/4622/print