How do I fix Windows after Ubuntu?
By Administrator on Dec 18, 2010 in Portable Ubuntu
Here is the situation: My brother tried to install Ubuntu onto his portable hard drive. After he successfully quit out of this (he was running Ubuntu from a thumb-drive) and tried to restart, the screen after the BIOS is loaded gives him a Grub Rescue error that stated that no such device exists (whether this his disk drive or his thumb drive, I am unaware). He can still run Ubuntu off of his thumb drive but his main hard drive with Windows will no longer load. This is a laptop, so we are not capable of formatting it externally. The back up disk will not load. It immediately sends him to the Grub Rescue (even though that should not even exist on his regular laptop). He has tried to load the disk from BIOS. It still gives him an error. We do, however have two of the same laptops. We are trying to get windows 7 to work again. If that is utterly impossible, we would be happy just to format it and get windows back. The restore disk is available, but the computer seems to no longer know the disk drive exists.
Please share whether or not this can be fixed. He’d rather not do it from the Ubuntu terminal because he has no experience with it. If there is a way to format the drive from the bios, that would also be helpful.
This is fairly urgent since he needs this laptop. Thank you for your time.
What searched for:
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- how to fix win 7 with grub rescue error?
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Colanth | Dec 18, 2010 | Reply
Download Test Disk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk and burn it to a CD. Boot with it. Tell it to activate the Windows partition. Remove the CD and boot. (Takes almost as long to tell it as to do it.)
Ben | Dec 18, 2010 | Reply
Your brother needs to learn about setting up the boot disk. When he installed Ubuntu, he told it to set Grub as the default bootloader. The files that tell Grub which OSes are installed in the computer are on the portable hard drive, so unless the drive is plugged in, it can’t find them.
The best thing to do for now is to boot from the Windows install disk. Choose to repair your existing Windows installation and Windows will overwrite Grub with its own bootloader.
Goerge | Dec 18, 2010 | Reply
can you press F8 and navigate to your window’s log in screen? You can go there and then to your msconfig and then delete the Ubuntu boot.ini entry so only your Windows 7 and recovery remain
gospieler | Dec 18, 2010 | Reply
In order to be able to boot You need to change your boot order, so your CD/DVD device is the first option. Read the following steps to know exactly what you need to do.
STEP 1: shutdown the laptop and remove any external device connected including the thumb drive.
STEP 2: (Skip this step if you know the bios input key)
Startup your pc/laptop and check the boot-screen for the Bios setup key, you must see a message similar to this one Press
to enter BIOS setup.The key to press could be one of these F1, F2, DEL, ESC or F10. When you press the setup key in the exact right moment, then you will get into the BIOS Configuration menu and will be able to change the boot order. Now that you know the setup key, follow with the next steps.
STEP 3: Enter the Configuration Menu to enter BIOS setup appears, tap the setup key repeatedly
• Restart your pc/laptop and when the message Press
• The Configuration menu appears. If the menu does not appear, and you end up doing a normal startup of the pc/laptop, then restart the computer and try again.
STEP 4: BIOS CONFIGURATION MENU – Change the boot order
In the main or system setup screen you should be able to see ADVANCED BIOS SYSTEM or BOOT or BOOT ORDER or BOOT SEQUENCE. if you don’t see something equivalent then use the arrow keys to navigate to each option and press ENTER to be able to browse the option.
When you find the option, press your arrow keys or your page up / page down keys to change the boot order.
Change the boot order so the CD/DVD device will be the first to boot to, then the Hard Drive as the third and so on. For this follow the instructions in the sidebar
STEP 5: Exit
• Before exiting put the DVD/CD disc on your DVD/CD device.
• Exit using the option to save the changes.
This will automatically restart your PC and it will boot from the CD/DVD disc.
If you use the restore/install cd/dvd disc the above steps will let you boot from it.
HINT: To create a bootable Linux thumb drive download the software needed and follow the instructions given at http://www.pendrivelinux.com