I have a virus, Ubuntu wont boot,

Asked by Joe Redburn

I have two hard drives in an old Dell desktop. Windows XP on one and Ubuntu 10-10 on the other. Both worked fine until last week when Xp go a really bad virus from the PC health Adviser program. I used Ubuntu to delete the program from XP and now XP will run (Badly) but Ubuntu wont boot.
I have an install CD and can boot from it.
My question is If I reinstall 10-10 from the CD will I lose all my programs and files that i have put on there over the past year?
regards
Joe

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Ubuntu grub2 Edit question
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J. Austin Rodriguez (jeanaustinr) said :
#1

If you're thinking of reinstalling Ubuntu, I suggest you do a backup first of all your data. You can do it by booting via LiveCD and transferring your files out of the hard drive somewhere like an external drive or a network drive.

The main folder you need to backup in Ubuntu is your /home folder. All of the user configuration and data files. The installers you used are stored in /var/cache/apt/archives/ unless you cleaned it up.

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delance (olivier-delance) said :
#2

Don't reinstall Ubuntu immediately but at first only bootloader: Grub2:
   https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling%20from%20LiveCD
If you need to reinstall Ubuntu, use manual partitioning and DON'T FORMAT the partition which hold /home. Your data should be kept. "Should" means it is wise to do a backup.

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marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said :
#5

Please tell how have installed Ubuntu inside Windows or alongside Windows (strongly suggested) ?

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said :
#9

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.