GRUB ?

[Rashkae]

Pastor JW wrote:
> Okay, ...a friend has an Acer 5100 with Vista and Ubuntu 8.04 (wubi install) 
> which until last night was working perfectly.  However, it now just starts 
> and goes to a plain black screen with the word "GRUB" and a cursor line but 
> never goes any further.  Left it sit over an hour.  It will take no input, I 
> thought tab might bring up some options but nothing seems to work.  On an 
> impulse, I rebooted it with my PClinuxOS 4 gig USB "pen drive" and it brought 
> up options which allowed it to boot to either the Vista drive or the Ubuntu 
> drive just like the machine used to!  Thought perhaps Grub was bad so booted 
> into Ubuntu and reinstalled it with synaptic but without the pen drive, no 
> joy.  With the pen drive in, it would also bring up the menu to boot to 
> Vista.  Once that menu is up one can remove the pen drive and boot into Vista 
> just like it always did.  Any ideas how to fix it?  He has many files on both 
> Vista and Ubuntu which he really does not want to lose.  And once past the 
> GRUB deal both systems work fine without any further need of the pendrive.  
> Actually it make no difference whether it is there or not as soon as the menu 
> come up.  

Boot the system with your pen drive in there and look in the
/boot/grub/menu.lst file

Look for a section that looks like:
## default grub root device
## e.g. groot=(hd0,0)
# groot=(hd0,1)

And let me know what your groot is set too.