General :: Clearing Error 15 From Grub - File Not Found

I am using Ubuntu 10.10 dual booted with windows vista. My boot is in a separate partition (sda5). My computer told me that there was limited space on that partition so I tried to clean things up using apt-get by removing old kernels. Turns out I didn't do it correctly because I consistently get an 'ERROR 15' when I shut down and rebooted my computer. I have a live-CD USB-stick so I tried reinstalling grub, (grub-install) updating the menu.lst (update-grub), and manually going through menu.lst and changing to root=(hd0,4) and groot=/dev/sda6. But I still get this ERROR 15 when I reboot.

when I do
sudo grub
find /boot/grub/stage1
find /boot/stage1

Both give me an ERROR 15 message and I'm not sure how to proceed with a diagnosis. When I ran update-grub, occasionally it used to tell me that /etc/fstab may be incorrect. Here is /boot/grub (note that stage 1 does exist!) ( this is /dev/sda5)

Code:
root@ubuntu:/# ls /boot/grub/
default fat_stage1_5 jfs_stage1_5 minix_stage1_5 stage2
device.map grubenv menu.lst reiserfs_stage1_5 xfs_stage1_5
e2fs_stage1_5 installed-version menu.lst~ stage1

Here is my problem
Code:
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
Error 15: File not found
grub> find /boot/stage1
Error 15: File not found

I guess my main question is, if stage1 can't be found, what does that mean? What should I do next?