Ubuntu :: Grub Broken - LiveCD Won't Boot / What To Do?

The computer I'm using is a Dell Vostro 1000. If you need any specific stats, let me know and I'll post them, but I don't have access to anything that will list them.

As of this afternoon, Grub will not longer boot. I don't know what prompted it; the only change I made was to the power management settings and installing IcedTea. It brings me to "BusyBox" after saying "No init found. Try passing init= bootarg." Then it brings me to some command prompt that doesn't respond to most bash commands I know, and it says "(initramfs)."

I had that problem two or three weeks ago after Fedora broke Grub, but I fixed it by using "grub-install" in an Ubuntu LiveCD. (No easy task to find what command I needed to use, though.)

But, now the LiveCD won't load. It hangs on the splash screen that just says "Ubuntu" with the dots underneath that indicate it's loading. This exact same disk (and I've reburned it, of course) worked fine when I had to clean up the mess that Fedora made. I tried switching to a terminal at the point where it hangs and there are no messages at all.

I already tried using acpi = off and burning the disk at the slowest speed (from two different computers).

I tried with the Mepis LiveCD, but the GUI just shows a blank screen. I can run commands using Alt+F2, and the cursor is visible, but that's it. I can switch to a terminal, but I can barely use grub-install at all as it is, and I can't figure out how to mount a drive through the command line.

An older version of a Sabayon Linux LiveCD works fine, but, unfortunately, doesn't do anything useful. I haven't tried Knoppix because it never worked on this computer.

If there are any other distros that I can use to run grub-install (preferably lightweight; I'm getting impatient downloading so many 700 mb iso files), I'm open to suggestion. Those are just the ones that I'm familiar with already.