PC boots to grub-rescue, cannot boot live distros from usb

[meloncrab]

Following situation:

I've got four partitions, one for media storage, one with ubuntu 9.10 32bit, one with crunchbang lite 9.04 64bit and one swap partition.

The partition with ubuntu has been formated from ext4 to fat32 (with nothing on it, obviously). Whenever I boot up the pc now, I get an "unknown filesystem" error and a grub rescue> prompt.

When I try to boot up a live usb image from my usb stick I either get a "linux kernel not found" message (crunchbang lite 32bit) or "initial menu has no LABEL entries!" error (gparted live usb) which changes to "Could not find kernel image: vesamenu.c32" after a couple of seconds.

Now, I'd really love to save my media partition or, more importantly, my crunchbang lite partition (which has one single important file on it, I'd love to recover).
If this is somehow not possible, then I'd at least like to get my system usable again by succesfully booting from usb.


I'm fairly new to using linux. I tried some grub-rescue commands, but not even the "help" command worked, so I'm fairly confused and helpless.

Thanks for your herp.

[impert]

Possibly the easiest solution is to re-install Ubuntu from a live CD IF you are sure you can identify the Ubuntu partition. Reformat it ext3 or ext4, and don't make any changes to the other partitions. (This means choose "manual" partitioning).
Then when the installation is finished and grub2 has found the crunchbang installation, it should be possible to reboot into crunchbang. Since you obviously have access to a working computer, why not download the 64-bit Ubuntu live CD and use that if your machine is 64-bit?

[meloncrab]

Alright, I finally got it running again. I formatted my pendrive to ext2 (not sure if that helped anything) and unmounted it before removing it from my other pc. I guess that when I simply removed mypeendrive after using unetbootin, the syslinux,cfg vanished from the drive, which then caused my computer not being able to boot from it. Even though I did try unmounting before removing before, both gparted live and super grub manager did not work, yet magically it does now.
The only other thing I tried that might have affected the outcome was using "set prefix=(hdX,Y)/boot/grub" in the grube recovery prompt, but I'm not sure if. It somehow was one of the rare commands that actually did not give me an "unknown filesystem" response (besides "ls").

In case this might help somebody.

The only reason I choose 32bit over 64bit is to get Source games running via wine and steam, which somehow crashes on my 64bit crunchbang.