Linux Help Boot Problem

[syborfical]

The other day I turned on a friend laptop

It has Dual boot linux. Ubuntu and win xp

Who ever set up the boot menu also put access to the recovery partion on it
I accidentally booted to the recovery partition now the laptop wont boot

It comes up with the following error

loading grub stage 1.5

error 17
cannot recognize file system or something

It?s a Compaq laptop

here is how the hard drive is partitioned

01 /dev/sda1 NTFS WINXP parttion
02 /dev/sda2 -EXT3 linux partion
03 /dev/sda3 -EXT
04 /dev/sda5 -Linux swap
05 /dev/sda4 -fat32 recovery partition


What do I need to change to it boots to the normal boot menu?
How do I deal with the recovery partition apprenlty u need to put some stuff in a conf file to ignore it or something

 

[Nothinman]

I'd boot from a LiveCD like Knoppix or even the Ubuntu installer and try to e2fsck the ext3 partitions, if Grub can't read the filesystem then it sounds like the recovery partition did something to them when you booted it.

 

[cprince]

boot from liveCD, mount sda2, edit the /boot/grub.conf file to set the default sda1 or sda2.