Restoring the MBR on a CD-ROM less Notebook

[Karl Larsen]

On 05/18/2010 01:37 PM, Amichai Rotman wrote:
> Hi All.
>
> My sister bought a new Asus UL20A. I managed to convince her to give 
> Ubuntu a try (it came with Windows 7 pre-installed), So i installed 
> 10.04 on it.
>
> It has a single 320 Gb HDD, I was very careful not to wipe the 
> recovery partition, but I had to cut the original system partition 
> (disk C:) into 2 partitions for Swap. so:
>
> It had a Disk C: (I think about 80 Gb in size) and the rest as disk D: 
> for data.
>
> I chose to manually partition the drive during the installation and 
> deleted the 80 Gb partition and created a 1024 MB for swap and the 
> rest for / (root), the rest - i didn't touch.
>
> After installation, the last option in the GRUB menu was Windows Vista 
> (although it was actually Windows 7). I didn't give it much thought...
>
> The deal was she tries Ubuntu for a week, then she decides if she 
> wants to keep it or go back to Windows 7. Regrettably - she chose the 
> latter.She has to go abroad for 3 months and she's affraid she will be 
> stuck and no one will know how to help her. She said she had nothing 
> against Linux but...
>
> I tried to launch the recovery process by pressing F9 during boot - 
> but nothing happened. I then tried to boot from that mysterious option 
> on the menu - an what da ya know ! it's the recovery process! So it 
> went about recovering - just as if I pressed F9 - and then told me 
> the recovery was done and I should click OK to shut down.
>
> And here is the part I need help with: The next time I pressed the 
> power button - it says there is an error and gives me the "grub 
> rescue>" prompt...
>
> Please help me! There is no CD ROM drive, no recovery DVD media 
> supplied (a note that came with the computer says one is not supplied 
> with this model).
>
> How do I boot from USB stick and recover the Windows 7 MBR / Boot loader?!
>
> All I have is my on Ubuntu Lucid on both my Desktop and my Netbook...
>
> Thanks!
>
> .:====================================================:.
>
> Amichai Rotman
>
> Registered Linux User#: 201192 [http://counter.li.org/]
> Registered Ubuntu User #12851 [http://ubuntucounter.geekosophical.net]
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> .:====================================================:.
         I did this on my laptop which had 100 GB for the C drive and a 
reload the Vista on the last of the 160 GB hard drive. Took some long 
time to cut 80 GB out of the C drive and put behind the D drive. Gparted 
did a good job but it was hard like Windows is hard to make work.


73 Karl


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
         Key ID = 3951B48D