I just installed Ubuntu a few days ago for the first time. I had have my main hard drive partitioned with XP on one and Ubuntu on the other. Today I was trying out Amarok for managing my iPod and my system completely froze up. I tried to force quit with no luck, and had to eventually just restart my computer.

Now I can only boot directly into XP. The Grub menu is gone. I tried the Ubuntu live CD and I can see that my files are still there, but the boot menu is gone. I tried reinstalling Ubuntu (but kept the existing profile) because I don't have any data I need to recover, but afterward it still only boots to XP.

What can I do, short of reformatting and reinstalling?

Which boot menu used to come up first? If it was grub (probably) you'll need to reinstall that on the MBR, otherwise you need to manipulate the Windows boot conf to include the linux partition entry.

try to find what you need here inside you have instruction on how to rebuild your grb

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

or

http://forjamari.linex.org/projects/supergrub/

Did you install the newest Ubuntu 9.10 release, and if so then the grub boot loader is the newer version 2, (which is some what different than the older grub 1). If both your hard drives are internal, than be sure to have the grub install onto your main drive master boot record. Here is a link to the grub site; http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/

Also try after you login with a rescue cd /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda

Make sure to change /dev/hda to whatever disk you have /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda.....

goodluck

Well I was short on time yesterday, so I tried reinstalling Ubuntu and doing a quick format of the partition it was on, and not importing any settings. I saw that the default setting for the boot menu loader was my secondary/storage drive, so I changed it to the drive with my XP and Linux partition. Now everything is back to normal. Thanks for the tips though, I've bookmarked those sites and will do some reading about Grub2.

I really like Ubuntu, but I wish I had looked into Linux earlier. It's been a little overwhelming learning how a new OS works and trying to get things customized to my liking. Better late than never I suppose.