This is a common issue on Dell and HP laptops apparently, and is not a Windows issue per se.

For me, it happened on a Dell machine, and it is incredibly annoying.

So, if you have enabled dual-booting, with say a Windows and Linux partition, all seems fine booting into your Ubuntu install, until that is, you boot up Windows, and then try to subsequently boot up your machine to either Windows or Linux.

What happens is a message:

module name not found, press any key

Of course pressing the “any key” does nothing, and you are unable to boot up any OS from the HDD.

There are a series of excellent links on this, all worth a look, as your situation may have slight differences to some mentioned scenarios within the links below:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1501591
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1560177
• http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/bootinfoscript/index.php?title=Boot_Problems:Windows_Writes_To_MBR
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1343851&page=2

What is happening is that certain Dell software, e.g. Datasafe, modify the MBR, and your GRUB gets corrupted/needs to be re-installed.

Quick Solution:

As described in links above, for a quick fix to allow you boot in again, load up your Live CD, e.g. ubuntu install CD you can download easily (using a Knoppix boot for example from the CD drive), and run from the CD drive. Then, open a terminal shell, and do the following:

sudo mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
sudo grub-install –recheck –root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

In the above, sda3 represents whatever partition your Linux install is on, so will likely be different for you – that should be the only thing you need to change above.

Once done, you can boot up again as per usual, until of course you log into Windows again!

So long-term solution is to identify all Dell proprietary software (most listed in links above and http://download.cnet.com/ccleaner/ and http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/406492-how-do-i-remove-dells-datasafe.html), fully delete them using CC Cleaner for example, re-boot using the Live CD GRUB trick one final time, and then you should be good!