I tried several things, and help, again, will be appreciated. With the little knowledge I have I will try to explain the procedures.
@Thierry: I have a MBR, and not GPT. I have Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) and dual-boot through GRUB; as is the standard setup found when Ubuntu is installed second and GRUB writes the MBR. Secondly, I didn't know what to specify at the 'boot from:' prompt, and I haven't tried it yet. Yes, I can key in text at the prompt. @cinap: 9front boots, and dies. I don't get installation / boot options at all. No prompt either. @erik: 9atom worked. Booting from CD (option 2) didn't, but installation (option 1) proceeded fine till I got stuck at [mountdist], couldn't locate the distribution and it wouldn't proceed till I specify a correct source, so I quit at that point, rebooted and ended up losing my grub. I was careful enough to specify the right partition for installation, however I didn't choose the suggested layout but modified it (specifying start and end blocks) to occupy only 3GB of the raw free space I had. Booting from a live Ubuntu CD I can now list existing partitions using fdisk -l, but I am unable to mount my Ubuntu boot partition. 'mount' doesn't recognise the file system. The NTFS and another ext2 partition that I had can be mounted properly. Here're my partitions. I have lost /dev/sda5 which was my boot partition. (Backed up, so no worries). Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 6374 51199123+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 6375 31298 200202030 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda3 31299 37359 48684982+ 83 Linux /dev/sda4 37360 37759 3213000 39 Plan 9 /dev/sda5 6375 30689 195310206 83 Linux /dev/sda6 30690 31297 4883728+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris So, 1. Why should my MBR get overwritten when I aborted the Plan 9 installation at [mountdist]? And why did my boot partition get spoilt? 2. What should I do to get the [mountdist] step to completion?
