First off, thanks for the help so far. It's been a lot more than I am used to receiving
So I tried to reinstall mint by setting the partitions manually. I told the installer to format almost all my harddrive to ext4 and set its mount point to "/". Then I set aside some space for swap. The install again seemed to go fine. However, when I rebooted I got the message:
So I tried to reinstall grub by following directions
here: (with the exception that I used my mint CD instead of an ubuntu cd). It asked something like: "Are you sure /dev is mounted" while I was reinstalling grub (I was browsing my /boot folder at the time, so I assume /dev was mounted). It then said that installation had no errors.
I rebooted to the now familiar:
I then tried to fix grub from this screen following the advice
here. "ls" gives me only:
(hd0) (hd0,msdos1) (fd0)
I found that by doing an "ls (hd0,msdos1)/" I could see the normal files usually in a linux "/" directory (including the boot directory). I tried to "ls (hd0,msdos1)/boot" but I get a "error: out of disk."
I am stuck at this point as I cannot do commands than involve using (hd0,msdos1)/boot.