Answer to yesterday's quiz question.

The partition type had broken. (God only knows how. I SWEAR I ONLY EDITED menu.lst.) So mount /dev/hda1 /mnt from the live CD first tried mounting it as ext2/3, and of course that worked (mount seems to look at the actual filesystem present, not the partition table). But GRUB couldn't work out what on earth it was. Windows had fuxx0r3d the partition table further, changing the type to Amoeba (?!).

chroot /mnt then grub-install /dev/hda would give the error The file /boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly. So fdisk to make /dev/hda1 Linux and /dev/hda2 swap, then grub-install /dev/hda and reboot, and I have Ubuntu back.

*pint* to the *pint* to the *pint*pint*pint* to dennyd. And everyone else who hazarded a guess. Remind me when I see you.

It appears the Windows partition has been trashed completely (FX: world's smallest violin playing "Start Me Up"), so I expect I'll do some funky things with parted to make the whole disk Ubuntu with two gig of swap for the one gig of memory it'll have after our next Crucial order.