Hi
I had Ubuntu on an external drive.
I formatted that drive and now I cant boot my own laptop.
This message
GRUB Loading starge 1.5... GRUB Loading please wait ERROR 21
is the saem one as I had before, if the hard drive wasnt connected to the laptop.

I am truly stuck - but I work in a place that has PC support. I took the machine to them and drew a blank. I need to research this issue, and then take the laptop back to the helpdesk.

During my research I came across this site and here I am asking for any pointers!

I dont want to lose this laptop as it has all the videos of my 5 month old little girl! And my wife will cut me off at the knees (or worse) if I dont get this remedied...

any advice will be much, much appreciated thanks a million.
DJ

I found this advice someplace :
Boot the windows disk, go to repair, and issue the fixboot and fixmbr commands (there's supposed to be an order to those two, but I'm not sure which goes first.)

But the guys in "helpdesk" tell me this: to get to the "repair" stage we need to be able to start the machine. They tell me that I need to bring the external drive here, take the internal disk from the laptop and place it in the external drive, then we can use the windows disk.

Does this make sense?

Your helpdesk are useless.
Go find a Windows install CD and boot that. Get into recovery console and run fixmbr.

Fixed.

Yes they were!
A coworker did exactly as you suggested.