Grub error 22 on a Thinkpad T60p with Triple-booting OS (Ubuntu/XP_SP2/Vista_Business)

[narutonakamura]

Hi 

I just ran into a seemingly simple problem but with no apparent solutions
that would also be uncomplicated. I am hoping some of you might be able to
help and that this is the right forum to address this concern.

Until today, I had Ubuntu (version 7.10 or one version older than that), XP2
and Vista Business running on my T60p. When I had originally purchased the
laptop, it came preloaded with Vista. On top of that, with a friend's help,
I had installed Ubuntu and XP (SP2) in separate partitions, and Grub was
doing the initial boot loading/OS selection. I had installed XP back then as
I was a little skeptical about Vista’s compatibility with the older
applications and wanted to keep XP just in case. However, barring a few
exception, I found no big reason to switch back to XP (I’m sure if one gets
into the nitty-gritty of it, XP will probably still turn out to be the
better choice, but for my software needs, it doesn’t seem to matter). 

Anyhow, I recently decided to get rid of XP to get some extra HD space. The
way my partitions were set up was (memory numbers approximates – don’t
recall specifically):

5 GB                          25 GB                           50 GB             
    
20 GB
ThinkPad Software       Ubuntu                          Vista                  
XP
(Inaccessible)

So I went into the Vista partition manager and simply deleted the XP
partition and allocated that space to Vista – really bad idea. I wish it
wasn’t so easy to do something as dangerous as that. It seemed a perfectly
legible and innocuous thing to do back then – nothing blew up, no blue
screens or anything. However, when I restarted my machine another time, I
got the following error:

GRUB Loading stage 1.5

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 15

My guess is that somehow, the partition table that GRUB uses is asking it to
find XP at its previous location but since it cannot find it, it kind of
chokes and locks up. Nothing works now. I can’t even press the blue
‘ThankVantage’ button to restore my system to a previous backup as GRUB
interrupts before anything and doesn’t allow that sector of the HD to run.
All I have access to is the system BIOS and all I can do with it is hardware
diagnostics test (which I have done and it passed, so the hardware doesn’t
seem to be corrupt at least). 

Unfortunately, I never burnt any kind of recovery disk or backup disk for my
machine and such a thing didn’t come pre-packaged with it. And since my
thinkpad was scheduled to automatically make daily backups, I didn’t feel I
could ever be in a situation I wouldn't be able to recover from! Couldn’t
have been more wrong! I called up IBM’s tech support and got the predictable
response that they wouldn’t help me with this as I installed all these
exotic OSes on my machine (I have a 3-yr full-service contract with them
which is supposed to cover every other natural calamity otherwise). He said
nothing can be done about my machine and that I will have to reformat it and
loose the data, since I have corrupted that partition table. The only thing
I could do is take it to a computer shop and have them probe my HD
physically or do any one of those tedious and expensive procedures to
recover the data and then re-format the machine. I don’t know how expensive
the procedure is as yet (will find out tomorrow) but I find it hard to
believe that nothing can be done about this problem in software and that one
has to use the brute force method.

Of course, this is as far as I could take it myself, so I’m not really sure
what else I can try. I did, in the mean time, upload a copy of the Ubuntu
Live CD on my USB key, which I’m told I can use to restore GRUB by doing
something fancy. I wouldn’t mind trying that but I’m very apprehensive as
all this stuff (especially when it comes to Linux) seems a bit too alien to
me right now and I don’t want to take a chance with my data. :-((

If anyone on this forum might have an idea of how I can fix things, I would
really appreciate it. 

Thanks a lot!

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