OK, I made a boneheaded mistake and now I don't know how to do, what needs done.

About 10 years ago, I used Linux on a regular basis, and then changed jobs. So here I am thinking I know what I'm doing. I tried to load Xubuntu onto an 8 gig flash pen. But it crashed half way through installing the boot loader, and now I cannot get it to boot. At all.

Without the pen drive in, nor install CD in the drive, I see:


With the pen drive I see a choice between

ubuntu 7.10 kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
ubuntu 7.10 kernel 2.6.22-14-generic (recovery mode)
ubuntu 7.10 memtest86+

All choices results in



So now I'm lost, What do I do?
It's a Dell, with the XP recovery disk on a partition on the hard drive I cannot access w/o booting with the live Xbuntu CD in, so I have no idea how to use the windows disk to remove GRUB, nor do I see a way to repair GRUB with the Xubuntu

(X)Ubuntu is not made to be installed in pendrives.
Try a specialized distro instead (Slax, Puppy, whatever...).

Grub has overwritten the MBR on your hard disk, rather than having it installed to the pendrive. What you could do, is add this to the grub config:



and then you can boot the system. However, what I'd probably be tempted to do is reset the MBR so that you can boot Windows again normally, since with the above grub config, you'll always have to have the pendrive connected, to get your system booting - at least, as far as I'm sure on that.

As for booting Ubuntu from the pendrive, no idea. I haven't tried installing a distro to a pendrive before.

I've had a number of install problems - not onto a pendrive - but relating to the install not picking up discs correctly even listing intel ich7 raid as raid and as separate discs. I would suggest using virtualbox to test installations. (If that is what you are doing) Who knows it may even allow an image file to be on a pendrive.

There is also info specific to ubuntu here http://www.pendrivelinux.com/ and google linux on a pen drive will bring up lots more.

John