This looks helpful!If not you can try moving on into the advance trouble shooting area to a command prompt and try bootrec.exe to attempt a repair.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392
Oh well, I don't know... since it says "missing ntfs signature" I wondered if there is a way of restoring/repairing/rebuilding it.What exactly does "rebuild the filesystem" mean?
That Ubuntu message may have something to do with either a "Dynamic" disk configuration or a "GPT" (Guid Partition Table) rather than a more standard "MBR" ."missing ntfs signature"
Yeah, I don't want to imagine all the hours I'd have to spend with babysitting my pc to get stuff working again. But who knows if this may the faster and easier way?You may have a look at this http://www.partition-recovery.com/
and see if there is some method or means by which you could employ something like that into your recovery efforts.
Basically, I'm just guessing now..... trying to get you around a format and clean install.
Good luck
Thanks, I appreciate your time but it offers a .exe file which won't run on Ubuntu and I don't know how to get Wine working... perhaps we can close this thread because this is a Linux issue now.I thought it provided a means to produce a bootable rescue CD/DVD/USB thumb drive, that you could boot from