help: error: no such partition, grub rescue, on a netbook
 

Hi guys,

I know there have been a ton of threads about this all over the internet but none have solved my problem.

I (foolishly) deleted a linux (Ubuntu 10.04) partition on my netbook and am getting the classic "error: no such partition" followed by "grub rescue>". I was running the stupid Windows 7 Starter edition that came with the netbook alongside Ubuntu.

The overwhelming majority of solutions to this problem constitute booting from a live cd or installation cd. This shouldn't be a problem for me because I have an external disk drive that I have booted from before. However, I cannot get the computer to boot from a cd, it just goes directly to and stays at the error screen, even with the cd already in the drive. When I turn on the computer, there is literally nothing before the error comes up, there is no option to boot from cd or change the boot device order or anything. I have tried booting up using the Ubuntu cd that I originally used to install 10.04 as well as a Windows disk, neither did anything.

Does anyone have any ideas about this?

Thank you.

What make is your laptop? If you google, you should probably be able to find the key you need to press to get into BIOS setup. Alternatively (and what I tend to do), turn on the laptop and hit F1, F2, F3, ..., F12, DEL, ESC and any other key I can think of, before it shows the error message. Obviously, you won't hit all of them in time, so you will have to keep turning it on and off until you find the right key...

Once in the BIOS, you should be able to select the CD as the drive to boot from.

Hope this helps,

Thank you for that. I had tried a bunch of different keys but turns out that it is F2 for some Asus netbooks. Problem solved.