No init found. Trying passing init= bootarg

I know there are several questions out addressing this issue, but mine seems rather sporadic.

I'm running a dual boot with Windows 7 and (now) Ubuntu 10.10 on a Toshiba Satellite. When I try to boot, I get the issue "No init found. Try passing init= bootarg." I've tried solutions such as fsck and e2fsck; they come up clean on the sda6(linux) partition, and an error on the sda5(swapoff) partition. A timeline roughly of what's happened.

Yesterday I was attempting to install a game that hung up, and I force shut-down the game. When I tried to reboot, I was brought to the error. What I found odd was that I was still able to boot to windows 7.

I wasn't able to change it, as fsck and e2fsck weren't working at all; I decided to use testdisk to get off the files I wanted and re-install ubuntu. I wasn't able to, giving the error of already having a process pending.

Somewhere in this I formatted/deleted the original partition.

Today, the same linux distro on the same usb, etc, was able to work, which I found strange as well. After some minor interference (a friend shutting it off mid installation), it worked, and booted successfully. I shut it down and put it away to take care of later.

When I came back, it gave the same init= bootarg error. I continued to look up solutions from the live disk, and attempted fsck and e2fck, which came up clean on the linux partition. I found an odd forum about a user mentioning only being able to boot after booting to live disk, shutting down, and then booting from the hard drive. I tried rebooting, and I am now back on the installation from earlier today. The thread had no response to the problem.

I'm not sure if this is a drive, system, or OS bug, or simply an error within the files. I'm happy to report a bug if explained how (I'm a bit new), and am curious if there are any solutions so that I don't have to boot twice.