dual booting(Windows 7/Ubuntu 10.10/11.04) not seeing any of the OSes

I've run into a problem on my HP laptop G32-301TX with i5 Intel processor and ATI Radeon graphics.

I have a dual booting with Windows 7 and at first Ubuntu 10.10 every thing runs fine till I upgraded.I found the new 11.04 being a bit slow and slightly buggy and dropped back to 10.10 after 2 weeks of use.

The thing about 10.10 is that it's sometimes freezes. One day its freezes and I had to hard boot it (manually force shutdown and start). afterward on start, it puts me on busybox.there were couple of times that I face the same scenario and I had to reinstall the GRUB using this post it worked for some time. After reading this (which I can see every time I start the machine ),I installed a fresh installation of 11.04 but I feel it was slow.

I've picked up a GParted disk and check my hard drive and it seems ok. so started working. this morning my machine is being slow and I restarted and then there is no GRUB, nothing like Oses list , only a blank dash blinking over and over.

I've just reinstalled the 10.10 back but still no GRUB list.I've put Windows 7 and didn't boot with it then I could see the list.booting in Linux puts me in terminal with intramfs prompt.

Question 1 How should I fix this ?

Question 2 The only thing I can see here is to reinstall Windows and Ubuntu later.IS that a GOOD idea? if yes which version should I use? 10.10 or 11.04 ?

Question 3 if I want to re-install my dual booting setup. should I format the Windows system reserve partition too?

I store most of my data on a separate partition so data lost will be limited.but this is a kind of mess because it's a work machine so I need to get it back ASAP.

Answer

1. It seems your grub might have been corrupted. You can use an Ubuntu CD to reinstall the grub or recover the grub. See if that works.


2. Personally I prefer Ubuntu 10.10 because I have found Ubuntu 11.04 to be buggy. It used to randomly log me out of my session sometimes, so now I have shifted to Ubuntu 10.10.


3. I am not sure how that works, but I believe that if you reinstall Windows 7, it should automatically do that.