A while ago I posted a thread about being unable to installed Windows 7 on a laptop HDD that had a corrupted installation of Ubuntu on it. Nothing would let be wipe it or delete partitions. Everybody agreed it was buggered etc.
I have solved it. Heres how I did it:
I ran Testdisk off the Ultimate boot CD and analysed the disk. It showed various errors. One of the options presented to me was "recover superblocks". I did not, and still dont really know what they are but as I had nothing to lose I clicked it and away it went...
I was then able to scan the disk again and recover bad sectors. After that I was able to format the disk and install operating systems on it again.
Hope that helps somebody
Incidentally, just discovered a new bug on Ubuntu 9.10...It would not let me add application launchers to the desktop. The problem went away after a restart and I had about 20 open office icons on my desktop from my previous attempts. Anybody else encountered this?