Converting a friend to Ubuntu - Continued

[David Robert Lewis (ethnopunk)]

Tab Gilbert wrote:
>
>     At startup he falls back to a root shell and his 2 ext4 disks (root
>     had errors, home was OK) had to be fsck before a new reboot (and he
>     wasn't yet at his 31st boot).
>
> This is a little to technical for me but I know the recent Vista 
> security updates conks out grub.  I posted the question on here a few 
> weeks ago but never got a response.  The solution I googled up was a 
> little to much for me so I had to reinstall Ubuntu.  I did not know 
> that Vista took three reboots to do the complete update so I got to 
> reinstall Ubuntu three times.  I know this is not addressing your 
> question but there is something funky about the Vista security update 
> on a dual boot system.  The problem might be the creation of Vista. 
>
> tab

It's one of the reasons I don't enjoy duel boot systems and never 
recommend them. Windows always figures out some way to write all over 
grub. A clean single installation is always better.

Have you tried booting up in recovery mode? You need to  press the shift 
key if its  grub2. If grub2 doesn't come up its because  Windows wrote 
over  it.