Re: recovering win7

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 13, 2013, at 3:41 AM, squareyes <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> I ran ,  dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb
> and ran the recovery dvd's again, no longer has a grub error, now
> has a drive error. I ticked the drive as bootable with gparted previously.
> dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb

The drive is not ticked as bootable. It's a specific partition that must be. 
The normal installation of Windows involves two partitions and it's the smaller 
"boot" partition (I think they call it a system partition) that has the active 
flag set.

> 
> I have been at this for nearly 2 full days now, shutting down, shifting 
> monitor,
> booting live ubuntu dvds, re running the recovery dvd's which take around an 
> hour to go through,
> shutting down and returning monitor to this machine etc etc and have now 
> re-installed ubuntu 12.04 works fine, which I am
> going to present to her and try to help her to use ubuntu.
> Her other alternative is to find some one with considerably more patience 
> than I have, will give her the recovery dvd's:-)

I'm not familiar with the Windows backup and restore method you're using. 
Clearly it doesn't restore the MBR bootloader, it's entirely possible it's not 
restoring the bootloaders, or the BCD. For that you need a Windows install DVD, 
and run startup repair.

Chris Murphy