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I basically used a LIVEusb I had made of Ubuntu 12.04 to try and dual boot both OS'. but it crashed at the partitioning stage and now Windows 7 won't boot. g Parted shows the same partitions that windows 7 had before. It also has an exclamation mark next to the main partition. I tried to fix the Windows booting issue with a Windows 7 installation disk but it doesn't do anything at the "press any key stage". Please Help I really need to access the Windows 7 Partition. Thanks

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5 Answers

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It sounds like your MBR got wiped out. Why did your partitioning fail? If there is a larger problem at hand you may want to focus on data recovery.

gparted should be able to repair partition tables, but I would just try to install ubuntu again. If you can complete the installation you should be able to boot into windows right away from the grub boot menu.

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regarding the reason for the partitioning failiure, I'm not exactly sure, everything was frozen for a couple of hours. I am a total newbie what is the grub boot menu, also I no longer have the option to dual boot with windows, do I click on 'something else' in the installation menu? Thanks for answering so quickly – Ronin Jul 15 '12 at 21:26
also the harddrive is fine otherwise. – Ronin Jul 15 '12 at 21:34
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Boot with the LiveCD or LiveUSB and do sudo fdisk -l. It will list all the partitions on your hard drive. Check the NTFS Windows partition by running sudo ntfsfix /dev/sda2 (the number would be different based on your partitioning). Try to reboot, if the problem still persists, you need to run the LiveCD or LiveUSB again and reinstall Ubuntu (if it failed the first time).

In the installation page, select Something Else and choose the partition to which you want to install Ubuntu. By default, the grub2 boot manager will detect other existing OS's in your hard drive, so it shall add the Windows 7 loader on the grub menu on boot.

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For a "quick fix", you might want to take a look at Boot-Repair:

Boot-Repair is a simple tool to repair frequent boot issues you may encounter in Ubuntu like when you can't boot Ubuntu after installing Windows or another Linux distribution, or when you can't boot Windows after installing Ubuntu, or when GRUB is not displayed anymore, some upgrade breaks GRUB, etc.

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Stick in your windows disk and run repair. Then download EeasyBCD (in windows) and add Ubuntu to windows boot menu.

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Try this one: Boot with Windows 7 DVD. select repair choose command prompt type bootsect.exe/nt60 c: (your windows installation drive)

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