I had my Acer Aspire 3000 as a dual boot XP/ubuntu 9.10 a couple years ago. I recently blew the dust of it and wanted to upgrade to 7/Ubuntu 12.10 so I began by formatting the Ubuntu side of the partition and apparently damaged the mbr as I could only get black screen with the error message:

GRUB loading. error: no such partition grub rescue>

I then slaved the hdd to my win7 desktop and formatted the entire drive, both sides of the partition then reinstalled it in the Acer and tried to install win7. Upon starting the Acer I got the same error message:

GRUB loading. error: no such partition grub rescue>

I then tried to reinstall Ubuntu 9.10 as I have an Ubuntu produced installation cd. Same result.

Next day I received a new battery I had ordered for the Acer. I plugged it and the power supply in and hit the power button just to see if I at least could charge the battery but to my surprise Ubuntu 9.10 began to install, so I let it and it did. Now the hard drive shows 58 gb and 2.5gb partitions neither of which is formatted NTFS for/by windows. I am guessing that the GRUB/mbr was repaired somehow by the Ubuntu reinstallation.

My question, should you choose to accept it; How can I get to my goal of dual boot win7/Ubuntu 12.10. I am a beginner and don't know much about linux or the terminology. Thank you for your thoughts and help.