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I imagine you didn't have a separate /boot partition? This is one reason I advise people to have one, means that if the main root partition dies, booting is still fine, and the insurance it gives you only takes up 64meg tops... I think the error message basically means that your MBR points to formatted space now. My understanding is that basically, the MBR isn't big enough to contain grub in its entirity, so execution starts there, then passes to the main grub executable in /boot, then it hands over to whichever OS you choose in grub. So if you don't have a /boot anymore, there is enough logic to be able to work out that something isn't right, but not much beyond that.
I'd recommend you find your XP cd, boot to recovery console and try "fixmbr" if you're determined to turn your back on Linux. The other solution would be to just reinstall Linux and re-establish a working grub install. If you don't need the space tied up on the Linux partition that will always let you come back again if your priorities change in the future. You could probably also consider resizing and reallocating partitions a bit further to create a small /boot partition and allocate the rest as a Linux partition, then once you have a working grub install, format the Linux partition but keep /boot. But given your recent experience, that might not be wise if you have stuff not backed up on Windows. Would be a good learning experience though.
Long story short, if you don't have access to your XP cd, you're probably going to reinstall Linux in some way shape or form. But if you're clever about it, you'll be able to at least reclaim most of the space on the partition as it stands now.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 2. December 2007 @ 03:41
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