grub and win7 wrecking my sunday...

Lord Derpington

Hey guys,

I have had a laptop (13.3 inch -no cd drive) dual booting win7 and ubuntu lucid.

Windows 7 updates left me with a black screen and an apparent non-genuine factory installed copy of windows, back around 1-2 months ago.
I wasnt too bothered and just used ubuntu hapilly since.
This weekend i thought i would finally get around to reinstalling, as per usual the sticker on the bottom of my laptop contains the key but its unreadable but i didnt care because i have a MSDN account with loads of keys so no biggie.

Reinstalled Windows after backing up data onto a extra partition and extHDD.

Windows 7 ate my grub menu and now im having woes to get it working again.
Booted ubuntu live from USB after reading tutorials online where people say just to reinstall grub, but i have had grub woes before and lost the windows partition.


Does anyone know a simple way to reinstall grub saftely other than reinstalling ubuntu, i have it all set up the way i like and dont fancy a reinstall even tho i know (even after a format) after a reinstall it pulls back most of your data and preferences.

Any help would be great ill put of fixing Ubuntu for a day or so, before i get sick of not having a decent command line

marco_polo

This can be done from the Live CD no problems, I have used it to undo windows installer damage a few times myself. Once you don't do anything until you are 100% sure you know which partitions are which you should have no problems.

Best guide I can find is probably this one on the ubuntu forums.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351

Redisle

You could also leave the Windows bootloader there and use EasyBcd to set it up to access Ubuntu. Should be able to have grub installed on the ubuntu partition and chainload to it using EasyBcd.

^Be careful with that tutorial. It's old, and Ubuntu has since started using Grub 2, which is more of a balls to configure. (Or less of a balls, depending on your viewpoint)

Btw, assuming your laptop is from some big OEM that key on the bottom would never have been used anyway. The OEM's key comes embedded in the OEM OS disk and activates automatically assuming it detects the appropriate SLIC in your bios.

Edit: There's a pretty good tutorial here anyway if you do want Grub as your main bootloader.

Lord Derpington

thanks guys, yea im using lucid so its grub2 or 1.98..

I was reading the same tut on the ubuntu forums id say and the 2006 date kind of put me off it tbh.


Oh i know the key on the bottom wouldn't be used, just that i couldn't read it despite my best efforts, 3 characters i couldn't make out so it wasn't worth the hassle.

I might give the chain loader a go, what i did before when this happened on a different machine was just reinstall ubuntu and from the formatted partition it reclaimed most of my apps and all of my data (i love ubuntu..)

Thanks guys appreciate it



Edit: thanks ill give that second one a go for definite!