[ubuntu-in] Urgent - Ubuntu Install breaks and Crashes Dell Inspiron

[Ramnarayan.K]

Hi

Recenty i helped a friend install Ubuntu 10.04 on his Dell Inspiron machine.

The OS already on board was Wincedows 7 Home Premium. There were 3
partitions 1 small one for Dell Utilities, the second was C:/ and the third
was Wincedows Recovery.

I changed the boot sequence to make the optical drive the first

Using Gparted i made a new extended partition out of C:/ and within this
extended created a root , swap and home.

Ubuntu installed well and was fully functional , as was the wincedows
partitions that showed up - including the recovery partition.

A day later my friend says his dell crashed and he cannot access the f2 and
f12 keys and nothing boots up

This was the error message he got

no module name found
aborted. press any key to exit
intel UNDI. PXE-2.0 (build 083)
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Cproration

For Atheros PCIE Ethernet Controller v2.0.2.3(06/18/10)

CLIENT MAC ADDR: B8 AC 6F 69 6C D4  GUID:
44454C4C-5300-104E-804C-C8C04F364253
PXE-E53: no boot filename recieved
PXE-M0F: exiting intel PXE ROM.
operating system not found

**
running a search on this i found this

http://www.nocrash.com/ncbbs/msgs/3247.shtml

and from what i could make out it seemed to be a common hardware problem,
esp on Dells.

The dell website , among its top 5 problems also shows this problem.

**
My first suggestion was take it to dell. I told him to not tell dell that he
installed linux as they may make some racket about it and now he feels that
linux caused this crash.

So am asking for advice,
a) how to recover this machine

and
b) whats the possibility that linux crashed this device

as far as b is concerned - i am fairly certain that it not got anything to
do with Linux and that bad hardware is to blame. So what is the off chance
of Linux being the culprit

kind regards
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