what can i do from grub rescue?

Question

i had my hard drive dual booting and was trying to delete one partition in gparted but i think it had grub on it.
now i cant boot anything.
i can get into the BIOS but i cant boot from USB, the screen just hangs with a cursor blinking in the top right.
i tried two different ubuntu USB startup disks, then made an openSUSE but they all just hang and wont boot.
if i boot from the hard drive, i get grub rescue, but 'help' returns 'unknown command'.
i was creating the USB startups by mounting ISO's in mac OSX 10.5, and copying the contents to MSDOS-FAT MBR USB's

Answer 1

Re-installing GRUB should work. If you have a LiveCD, boot from that and follow step 13 here.

If not, you will have to use USB, but you can't usually just copy the contents of a boot CD over - some distros provide their own tools for making USB boot drives, so you should consult the distro's documentation. Usually, in addition to making sure the stick is formatted correctly with the MBR, you'll need to install syslinux after (or maybe before) copying over the files from the CD.