Re: recovering win7

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 12, 2013, at 3:30 PM, squareyes <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 12/01/13 19:17, squareyes wrote:
> <snip>
> Thanks everyone,
> have checked out sites mentioned, but unfortunately I don't have
> a win7 cd, only the "backup" discs, would be no problem if I did.:-)
> I would have thought that by recovering with them would format the drive 
> anyway,
> but that's microsoft anyway. Will try and borrow a winxp cd and try try 
> recover mbr from it.

You can boot almost any linux live cd that as syslinux on it, and use dd to 
write its mbr bootloader to your disk with:

dd if=/usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb

That's a 440 byte file that will exactly replace grub's jump code, with the 
conventional code that looks at the partition table to know where to jump to. 
The first sector of the partition with active flag (boot flag) set, is where 
this code will go. So as long as you have the proper active flag set for the 
Windows boot partition, this will work. From there it loads the Windows 
bootloaders.

Chris Murphy