Linux Format forums

[el10]

My son in law has recently (Oct.-2011) bought an Asus EeePC 1201NL, preloaded with Win XP. No Recovery or Utilities CD/DVD, (although the manual says the CD/DVD that comes with the machine), were supplied with the netbook.

He has been using Ubuntu, and wanted Ubuntu 10.04 on the new machine. He was told by the vendor that it would accept Ubuntu.
He he came to me for assistance.
Although I have successfully installed at least 4 dual booting systems (Win-XP & Ubuntu) on variuos discarded machines.
On this occasion I tried to install side by side to the existing Windows XP, but when the process was finished we could NOT access the machine either with Win XP nor with Ubuntu.

I have tried all sorts of things but I always end up by getting the following on the screen:
“ error: no such device: e3d001dd-b57e-4b27-ac3a-6e6cbf02a17c.
grub rescue>”

After a lot of fiddling I managed to access the machine as follows:
Inserting a USB with Ubuntu 11-04 Live. On Boot up and pressing the ESCape key (sometimes after pressing the f2 Key), it will give me the Dual Boot choice, and I could access the netbook HDD and consequently I could access either Win XP or Ubuntu.

If I do not follow the above procedure I get the above error message.

My guess is that the problem could solved by using grub and removing the necessity of having to boot the machine with the USB 11.04 inserted, but I do not know HOW and a Step by Step solution would be very much appreciated !

Can anyone help ?
Thank you

[PCNetSpec]

First thing to try .. do whatever you need to do to boot Ubuntu from the hard drive.

Open a terminal and run:

[el10]

Thank you for your suggestion. Someone also suggested I visited "Boot Repair". After downloading Secure Netbook Remix and installing it on an USB, Boot Repair has restored the boot to Windows but I hve lost access to the not successfull Ubuntu installation. So I am now (defeated) accepting the situation " as is", but would like to restore the disk space used by Ubuntu (see image), and hand back the machine, possibly have another attempt at Dual Booting at a later time.
Has all hese problems have anything to do with the EF shown on the image?
Thank you /media/COMPUTER8/2012_Temp/EeePC/EeePC_Images/DSCF3143.JPG
PS: I wanted to enclose a ".jpg" image of the Hard Disk partition showing the 4 partions, but did not know how. I clicked on radio button Img but what then ?
_________________
Help to make Linux simple for mortals