Hello Ubuntu community,

I find myself in an interesting situation. I have a Dell Inspiron 531 with Windows Vista. Recently my brother decided it would be a good idea to overwrite Vista with the Windows 8 consumer preview. Since we have had this PC for a very long time, we have long since lost the Vista CD, and according to the Windows 8 preview website you cannot recover your previous OS without it. I thought this would be a good opportunity to try out Ubuntu (since we obviously cannot keep the preview as an OS), but it appears that Ubuntu 11.10 Desktop is not compatible with Win8. Ubuntu doesn't run from the LiveUSB I made, instead it freezes on the loading screen and then disintegrates into black and white stripes. I blamed this failure on Ubuntu not being compatible with win8 yet and tried to install Ubuntu from the USB on a partition made from the remaining space on my hard drive - about 100GB.

However the installer crashed while loading modules and told me I didn't have enough disk space. Since then, I have not been able to load either Ubuntu or Windows, BIOS is shifted over to the left of my screen, and I always get the same message:

error: unknown filesystem
grub rescue>

typing "ls" at the prompt gives me the following:

(hd0) (hd0,msdos7) (hd0,msdos6) (hd0,msdos5) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1)

does this mean I have multiple partitions running windows on my computer? Is it possible to recover Vista without the disk? Are all of my problems stemming from Ubuntu not being compatible with Win8 preview? (I realize the majority of my questions are about Windows, but seeing as the prompt I get is for grub I thought I would ask here first.)

Any insight anyone has on this predicament would be greatly appreciated.