Re: recovering win7

[squareyes]

On 13/01/13 10:40, Chris Murphy wrote:

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

Hi Chris,
tried that , got

address@hidden:~# dd if=/usr//share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb

dd: opening `/usr//share/syslinux/mbr.bin': No such file or directory

Not sure what I am doing , looked for syslinux and showed below, nothing to lose will try them in the line of code,

address@hidden:~$ whereis syslinux
syslinux: /usr/bin/syslinux /usr/lib/syslinux /usr/bin/X11/syslinux /usr/share/man/man1/syslinux.1.gz

Is there anyway that I can format the drive to get rid of any residual grub?

Take care
Winton