J handed off his Eee to me today. He’s studying for finals and also moving and his laptop choked. Machines always fail when you need them most: so back your shit up, okay? He said it was only booting to a command prompt, which isn’t quite accurate. It boots into Windows just fine, but booting to Ubuntu lands you (me) at a Grub prompt.
Luckily, I keep a USB stick with RIP Linux on it handy. RIP Linux is handy. Booting from USB was not as easy as it could have been but I did work it out.
Useful commands: fdisk -l, mkdir, mount, fsck.
Useful rundown: this post on WUBI, especially the tip on looking for “root.disk” and running fsck if you can’t mount it.