OK I have a laptop computer. It had vista home basic installed and I tried to switch to ubuntu 8.0. Everything was running fine and then my system crashed! Ever since then i can't boot from the hd. It goes to a grub loading screen 1.5. The it tells me i have a grub loading error 25. I have no idea what that means. I Hardly know how to use a computer but i tried to reinstall ubuntu to see if that would help but i get to the partition part of the installation process and it can't find my hard drive. my bios settings are all correct and I have no idea what to do. One more thing about that. I can use the live cd as long as i use the try ubuntu with no changes to your system but before it loads into that it has an error list show up and runs error lists for about ten min. befor it is ready to use.
Can someone please help me understand what I have done and what I can do to fix it.
Thanks in advance,
Paddy24

Based on the information you have provided, there is no way someone from this discussion group will be able to help you. The best course of action is to find someone who knows about computers and who is willing to make a house call.

In terms of usefulness, when you post to a discussion group, saying "there is a list of errors" cannot remotely compare to the actual list of errors. Or even of one error.

From the grub manual


Did you try to use the rescue option from the live cd ?
If gparted is installed on the live cd, see if you can see the HD.

If you are new to Linux, then this would mean that you do not have a lot of relevant or important data on the broken laptop. A system crash could have damaged some core system files, and an easy solution (although not really elegant) would be to reinstall the system.

It sounds to me like you've had a hard drive failure, check to make sure the harddrive is pluged in securely.
The OP has tried to reinstall and the OS does not see a HD so this tells me this is a Hardware issue not a software problem.

Edit: Also just because this person is new to linux has nothing to do with his/her information NOT being important. They could have had priceless information on the system for all we know.

As a test...

Do you have a live-cd that you used to install linux? Does the system POST and will it boot the live-cd?

If it boots, can you open a terminal and, with root privileges, type the command "fdisk-l" to see if the partitioning tool sees the HDD? If the command returns any results, post them to us here.

Lacking a linux live-cd, download and burn a copy of PartedMagic and open a ROXTerminal for "fdisk -l"