Just got my brand new Inspiron E1505 with Feisty Fawn on it from Dell. Turned it on and was pleased to see things just work. Unfortunately after letting Update Manager update some packages and forcing me to reboot, grub would fail with the message:
"Unable to mount partition"
Long story short - the kernel upgrade pulled down by Update Manager altered grub to start with:
root (hd0,0)
This is a problem - digging around my old menu.lst, I found that the Inspiron E1505s are supposed to run:
root (hd0,2)
Changing menu.lst to use root (hd0,2) fixed my problem and I'm able to continue with my life. I hope that my laptop is an isolated incident although I fear it isn't. Anybody else run into this problem?