Hi - posted this on ubuntuforums, hoping to catch more viewers here, I'm in dire need of some help!

I have been dual booting xp/dapper, not using XP more than 2 or 3 times in the last month. I went into XP today, made a new user, logged out, logged in as my new XP user, and rebooted, then after the GRUB menu (I chose Ubuntu as usual) I saw the boot screen, but...

after the 2nd item in the boot sequence (mounting root file system or whatever) had been there for a few seconds, I got a list of errors starting with something like
"failed to mount dev/hda5 on /root: no such device"
and continuing with other "failed to mount" errors saying "no such file/folder" - no surprise if the device wasn't found!

There were other errors, apparently hda5 does not have sbin/something, and there was some reference to tty that I should have written down.

Can anyone advise me how to resotre this? I am using EXT2IFS on XP to salvage as much as I can from the home folders of my 2 Ubuntu users, and will try again soon.

I'll also note the errors in full if someone thinks they could help with this extra detailed info, in the meantime I'm kind of panicking.

Thanks
C

please do not mark threads as urgent. it is not urgent for any of the volunteers who kindly donate their time to help others, and is usually considered rude.

Does single user/recover mode work when you select it from grub?

@ uteck: I'm not sure what you mean, I've not needed to work in recover mode before so despite being happy enough using a shell I've pretty much frozen on this one. If there are any commands you can suggest I'd appreciate it

I'm now hunting for Grub recovery tips, fingers crossed...


@ acid_kewpie: It's not like I said "hey XP doesn't boot by default and I haven't tried anything". My Ubuntu installation is used for 90% of my computer-based work and 100% of someone else's, so in this case I'd call it pretty urgent.

I'm not suggesting that it's urgent for others to help - I help on various forums and I agree that we are all kind if we volunteer, yet I also feel that a post that is urgent to its creator should not be flamed. I was just using an icon that is built in to the forum system, after all.

Aside from etiquette, do you have any other suggestions?

Update - the issues resolved itself after editing the partition table (I was aiming to move /home to a separate partition and reinstall, but after a recommended reboot hda5 was found and Dapper loaded fine).

I had to edit /etc/fstab because hda6 and hda7 (swap and fat32) had got switched round whilst creating hda8, but it is all fine.

Thanks again to uteck, your advice was welcome even though I didn't do anything drastic in the end!

This was solved thanks to ubuntuforums.org, I would recommend that anyone with problems tries any and all forums since, as I found, a varied audience gets varied advice. Maybe it was just that I didn't use the "urgent" icon over there...