How to recover my MSI wind!?

[jorgb]

Dear Ubuntu users,

I have a problem I can't really solve I hope an Ubuntu/Linux guru can help me..

I have a MSI Wind U100. It had Windows XP on the second partition. The first partition contains a recovery partition. I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on it and have overwritten the Windows XP partition. No biggie because I wanted Ubuntu. However the touchpath is acting up badly and I want to return it.

Now comes the problem. The grub bootloader shows me the Windows XP boot partition, I can boot to it but because the partition is now ext3, it cannot restore the Windows XP installation on it. So I thought I would reformat the Linux ext3 partition to NTFS and then boot into the recovery manager so I can return this laptop, but the grub bootloader dies because it can't find /boot/grub/menu.lst which is understandable.

So I am at a loss. What to do? I have no portable DVD player (too expensive) but I need to restore that laptop so I can return it. My idea is to put grub and the whole boot loader + files on a seperate partition that is still alive when I format the primary partition to let the restore tool do it's work

Any thoughts on this predicament? Thanks in advance!
- Jorgen

[damis648]

I would download and boot Super Grub Disk (http://www.supergrubdisk.org/). It will allow you to boot from the medium of your choice. Boot from this CD, and then navigate through to boot from the recovery partition.

[jorgb]

Thank you damis648, I will try to do that and see if I am able to boot from my Windows with a USB disk, if so my days is made!

Regards,
- Jorgen