The upshot is, in the words of the website, that I have "hosed" my Kubuntu install.
Fixing it is probably not all that hard. Do you know what in particular is "hosed"? It could be all you need to do is fix your boot loader, and then everything will work fine.
I have Suse10 installed on other partitions and I can happily see my kubuntu partitions so the file systems aren't corrupt, its just that Kubuntu won't boot anymore. I'll happily resign myself to a fresh install of Kubuntu Dapper except the only data I don't know how to retrieve is information stored in my phpwiki that relies on MySQL for the content storage. I'd forgotten I had it on my machine but now that I have remembered it I'd really like it back.
Yes, by a couple of methods: if you can mount the partition, you can possibly chroot to it, and run mysqldump to back them up. If not, you can copy /var/lib/mysql/phpwiki/* somewhere, and then put the directory back on your new installation of mysql, set the owner user/group back to 'mysql' and the permissions the same, and it should pick up the database again. Craig