I recently installed 9.04 on my Windows 7 pc as a dual boot. Shortly thereafter 10.04 was released and I tried to upgrade. The upgrade failed, so I wiped out my ubuntu partition and tried to do a clean installation. Unfortunately, wiping the partiting messed up GRUB, and now I couldn't get into either OS. I looked on the forums for help, but all references to fixing GRUB on a Windows PC was to Vista or older versions of Windows. Changes to Windows 7 meant that none of the posts had the proper fix to the problem.
However, after much searching I came across a post on a Microsoft forum (Microsoft Answers) that provided the solution. The original solution posted by a Microsoft moderator didn't work (shocking, I know). However, another forum member did supply a solution that worked perfectly (credit here goes to Ramin15 - well done!). The original post is here:
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/...d-4cbadd7c933c
But the relevant part for removing GRUB is here (I note here that his situation matched mine perfectly - your condition may be different so proceed at your own discretion):
"Quick and easy fix to remove the dirty GRUB and get Windows again.
1. Put the Windows 7 installation disc in the disc drive, and power cycle your PC after setting it to boot from CD Drive in BIOS.
2. Press a any key when you are prompted & select [language, time, currency, keyboard etc.] & click Next . Select Repair Your Computer option in the dialog window.
3. In the ‘System Recovery Options’ window Click the 1<sup>st</sup> Option Startup Repair and let it do what it wants to do, but in my case it didn’t solve the problem so I went to the next step.
4. In the ‘System Recovery Options’ dialog box, go to the last option i.e. Command Prompt .
5. Once in the command prompt (X:\Sources> ), type exactly the following commands in the same sequence
bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
C:
CD Boot
Attrib bcd –s –h –r
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /RebuildBcd
then it said
“Scanning all disks for windows installations.
Please wait, since this may take a while…
Successfully scanned windows installations: 1
[1] C:\windows
Add installations to boot list? Yes(y)/No(N)/All(A) : “
I pressed ‘Y’ as there was only one instance of windows installation. Then it said The operation completed successfully.
6. Next entred the following command bootrec /fixmbr It said The operation completed successfully.
7. Next entred the following command bootrec /FixBoot Again It said The operation completed successfully.
8. Set the BIOS again to boot from the HDD and reboot.
GRUB was gone & finally the cool windows 7 was booting again."
Now that my pc is working again, I will go back and try installing 10.04 again - I hope it works this time!
Bookmarks