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View Full Version : [SOLVED] Accidental MBR erase, now need to restore it



linkxs
September 20th, 2009, 02:56 AM
Hi there,

I had win 7 + ubuntu 9.04 and I accidentally erased mbr, forgetting that it'd kind of kill the partition table. how would i restore it? I really need to have it back up by midnight (5 hours).

There are about 8 or 9 partitions there.

Thanks for any help.

dreamingdarkness
September 20th, 2009, 03:47 AM
It depends which MBR you want to reinstall - If your most urgent need is a working system, you need one of two things: an Ubuntu Live disk or a disk with Windows 7 on it.
With a Linux LiveCD you should be able to either pull GRUB up and fix the MBR or fix the MBR manually (much more advanced, I can't guide on that!).

If you have or can burn one, a Super Grub Disk from http://www.supergrubdisk.org/ will let you re-write GRUB into the MBR and should re-write the MBR. You could re-write a Windows MBR but it won't let you access your Linux partition then.

With Super Grub disk, try to autofix or boot without the MBR being recovered, then if you have a backup you can restore from it or at least get what you need done. Not sure if this helps, but I hope it does!

Instructions that might help are here:
http://members.iinet.net/~herman546/p18.html

linkxs
September 20th, 2009, 04:24 AM
thanks for the reply,

I only marked this thread as solved because i moved it here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7977292&posted=1#post7977292

i was thinking of trying the supergrubdisc, i'm gonna try it now

dreamingdarkness
September 20th, 2009, 04:39 AM
Ah, it got marked resolved between my opening it and replying. Glad to see you're getting help on it! Good luck, and SuperGrubDisk has saved my bacon a number of times, hope it does well for you. That or TestDisk as someone else mentioned.

linkxs
September 20th, 2009, 04:43 AM
just tried super grub disc, didn't work. tomorrow when i get the sata external enclosure i'll try testdisk.