Okay, so, well...
When installing Ubuntu the X time [where it worked
], I have chosen the ReiserFS filesystem, because Ext3 would take 200 MB right after formatting (lost-found dir?), and Reiser would only 30 MB. Okay, so I've configured Ubuntu, installed my favorite apps, and I've installed Americas Army. I have successfully completed some training missions, but one took too long to load, 7 minutes
... I have loosen my patience and I rebooted the system, because there was no progress bar thing (that could show me the results)... and there it was. GRUB took almost 40 seconds to load the boot menu:
GRUB Loading stage 1.5...
Loading GRUB, please wait....
took 40 seconds. After selecting Ubuntu... it took more than minute to show something... I rebooted the system, and tried to do it again. I thought my disk is pwned, so I didnt wait very much, rebooted the system *again*, sticked the WinXP installation CD into the drive, got into recovery console, fixmbr, reboot, ... thank God I haven't anything clobbered in NTFS partition.
The unlikely long time of loading GRUB was, because the boot menu is read from the reiserfs partition. I haven't waited very much and I did a quick fixmbr only to doublecheck NTFS and all my data are safe (yeah I have made backups, but reinstalling everything all over again...
)...
What should I do now? I can, of course, boot only into Windows, from now on... I will, tomorrow (9:46 PM now
), try to boot from Live CD and ... what? rebuild GRUB?... how?, but I think the whole reiserfs partition is, ... gone. I think it could read something (the bootmenu would display from the partition, but loading the OS would be an over-night job for sure
)... Or... reformat, repartition, reinstall ? I should be ashamed as I have made the error myself. I didn't have on my machine the patience