I have been using Ubuntu 12.10 as a dual-boot on my primary computer, lately everything has become a bit unstable, Steam games crash often, everything has been slowing down a lot. Anyway, my computer came with 64bit Windows, and I had 32bit Ubuntu installed. My plan was to wait for Portal 2 to come out, wipe the hard-disk, and install 64bit ubuntu, but because everything got a little unstable like I said before I decided to wipe it a little earlier, I will explain what I did in steps:
- Copy all my data I want to keep to an external harddrive
- Download 64bit Ubuntu 13.04 and make a bootable usb-stick
- Select the option: format harddrive and install ubuntu in the setup.
After that was all done I couldn't wait to restart my computer to feel the speed of a fresh install, but unfortunately; my pc came up with an error saying there are no active partitions and running the HP diagnostics gave me a BIOHD-3 error.
Now, after doing some research I think it's my MBR that is pointing to a partition that doesn't exist anymore. I found something on the forums telling me to open grub in the terminal, so that it says grub>. The first command I would have to type was find /boot/grub/stage1 but that gave me a file not found error. I also tried the HP recoverydisks to fix the MBR and then reinstall linux but for some reason those just keep loading files and rebooting.
So my question is: is there a way to reformat the drive and restore it as if I just bought it and took it out of the box, with an empty MBR and no partitions?
Thanks in advance :)