Marco Braida answers a lot of questions on this matter at launchpad.net. --Question 120822. He seems to suggest the issue is related to Wubi, and urges installing on an actual partition. I am not sure where the problem lays, but somewhere in the combination of easy-to-use tools, I ran into some big trouble. If I was a Windows user "giving Linux a go", this would have been a poor beginning. :unsure:

Thanks to all who helped.
PS: NTSC is a television broadcast standard. I spent many years as a broadcast engineer. NTFS is a file system, and that is what I meant to have typed. And the Wubi install was pointed into a partition I created using the Windows Disk Manager MFC in empty space on the drive.

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This is an excellent summary. I ran into just this issue, and on researching it here and elsewhere I found the things you say about Wubi to be the case. The Wubi install is very easy. It is silent. For the most part everything autocompletes. But yes, it, or something it contributes to, can cause a problem with booting the computer, in my case, after Ubuntu offered auto updates. This was un-recoverable, so I eventually just did an install from the iso image, as you suggest above, and told it to delete and use the entire disk.

My problems focused around booting. After powerup, when the computer was running through its list of PCI connections, this process terminated early, and it changed to "Boot From CD ROM:" If the CD was in the drive, it rolled the CD. If not, it returned a "No Device Found error, and terminated the boot. The last thing in the PCI device report was ACPI, and this line was not displayed completely. Many sources recommend adding "noapci" in the bootloader file. This may help, but as my computer would not boot, I found it hard to edit that line. Some skill with using a live CD to edit files in the install will be valuable, and I intend to learn them. On the other hand, Wubi may have modified the MBR of my Win7 install, and in that case some of my helpers have suggested that the answer is to run FIXMBR using the Windows rescue disk.

There seem to be a number of people who fall into this problem, and the traffic I have found focuses on ACPI, Wubi, Ubuntu 10.4, and, again, the upgrades that are offered after you are running, which was the beginning of my problem. If Cannonical intends 10.4 to exploit the gap caused by the release of Windows Vista, then it must not be this easy to blow up a working machine.

Thank you, All.

Yet Another Update

1) The DMI sequence stops at ACPI controller. Some literature (Tom's hardware ACPI section) suggests that certain boot loaders overwrite a part of the MBR that is really critical to getting the machine running. May have to look at using a superboot disk to get the machine running so I can undo what the Grub update did.

2) The Grub Rescue prompt does in fact respond to valid commands. I will head back in with a list of commands on the chance that there is a fix. Any advice?

Update--
Based on one of the other comments in this thread (Kode followed by Google), I looked at WUBI again, and the Wikipedia articles say it is pretty heavily integrated with Windows, and my not have used my new partition at all, but rather written the install to a file within Windows 7. I told the WUBI installer to put it there, but I did not verify it. If I read correctly, this may make it impossible to remove the Ubuntu with either a LiveCD or with Unetbootin. And of course, my machine won't start.

Help? :(

This is exactly my problem. I did an unattended install using WUBI on a modern machine that has two drives, one Vista, and one Win7. There was room on the Win7 drive to shorten the partition and create an empty new partition using standard Microsoft Console Tools. I created a new NTSC partition for Ubuntu desktop and launched the installer.
It was late, and I went to bed, and the installer did its thing. In the morning Ubuntu ran perfectly!

Then a pop up appeared advising of over 200 updates. I clicked, and off it went. It stopped for input once, on the grub screen. The window had three partitions listed. The pop up text had three paragraphs appeared to say in the first paragraph to "select all of them" and in the last paragraph not to. I went with the first paragraph and clicked them all. Now Ubuntu does not work. Nothing does. In the middle of my computer's start sequence, while "Verifying DMI Pool data" an error pops up " Error: No such device.." followed by some hex code. On the next line is the grub rescue> prompt. But it does not recognize any command I give it, even the ones from various grub 2 docs.

I was delighted to see how easy the install went, but sad to see how easy it broke. Most of the instructions for making this better involve burning an ISO image of a Live CD and accessing that portion of the bootloader. But this machine has no optical drives. I do have a Terabyte USB drive, but none of the instructions cover that.

So I feel that victory was in my grasp, and after i did an upgrade, it went south. Any way to unravel that upgrade? If this were Windows, I could just go to a restore point. But of course, I can't even boot the machine now.

Help?