great news! I proceeded to overwrite the first 255 sectors of my windows partition with the first 255 from an old ubuntu partition! now my computer thinks ntfs is ext3. apparently you can fuck your HD 9 ways to sunday, but there's no such thing as "unfucking".

oh, and the first result when you google "restoring grub"? the one at the ubuntu forums archive? yeah, that doesn't work anymore. try that now and you erase your program directories.

If you use grub1, you just use grub-shell to install it to the MBR. Hope you learn to back up your shit before messing with the partition table etc.

I got my data from the ntfs partition backed up, and then managed to fix the partition table using testdisk. Reinstalled windows and now that works fine, aside from it not having a driver for the ethernet for some reason, when it managed to find it before. Now I just have to get Ubuntu reinstalled. Would it be possible to copy the setup from my good HD instead of doing a full install and having to get all my programs and updates again?

>>336
Back up /etc/apt/sources.list and your shit in /home, reinstall Ubuntu as your normally would, then copy those files back to where they originally were and run a full update. All of the programs you installed before will be reinstalled.

just su to root in a terminal and run update-grub

done

>>337
I did this, but it still didn't reinstall all my old programs. I'm beginning to suspect there may actually be a disk surface issue as opposed to data corrupted by a swinging write head. Even after the fresh install the system check still fails.

I'd just back up off a LiveCD and reisntall.

Then, if you wanna make linux install without the fucked up partition table

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M count=10 which will zero out the first ten megs of the disk, which should get rid of the partition table.

Just boot up your system with a live cd mount the drives and do a chroot, now you can re-configure your grub. If you need info on how to do a chroot check the gentoo.org manual page. There is a good walkthtough in the quick install guide.