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I recently was performing a fresh install of Windows on one of the partitions on my SSD and for some reason I decided to delete the windows boot partition from within Ubuntu before cloning over a factory reset version of Windows from another drive (using Clonezilla). All I ever touched was the big C: partition I had been using for windows, but when I rebooted, I couldn't even access Ubuntu: the windows boot manager I had been using to dual boot still showed both options but BOTH of them gave me errors that it couldn't find bootable media. What do you think happened? Did I screw up my MBR? I've connected the drive to another system using a usb-SATA connection and it shows the volumes I'd expect still there, but the ubuntu partition now shows up as RAW. I'm worried that I may not be able to recover my Ubuntu installation which is exactly what I was trying to avoid.

Since then I've done various things to do a fresh install of windows on the old (newly reformatted) partition, including using the windows installation disk and each time the installation is supposedly successful but the computer will never boot into an OS. Repairs to the MRB don't seem to have any affect. I'm going to try and save an image of the RAW partition that used to contain ubuntu, wipe the drive, and try cloning a drive that is booting properly, but I don't know what I should do to make sure that I can get my Ubuntu install back. I have saved an image to a exFAT USB and I can also make a partition-partition backup on another drive (using clonezilla) but I don't know what format the target partition should be. I can't make it ext4 in windows and I can't make it RAW either.

Someone please help! What did I do when I deleted my windows partition from within Ubuntu?

Thanks.

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  • Thanks for the suggestion. I did try that and it wasn't able to make the drive bootable, so after MUCH trouble shooting I decided to cut my losses an reinstall Ubuntu later after I had cloned my entire drive. There seemed to be a related issue with connecting my ssd through the SATA to USB adapter I was using on my laptop and things seemed to go more smoothly when I had my SSD hooked up to the native SATA connection.
    – nViz
    Jan 15, 2014 at 16:06

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The first thing you should do is try to see the actual partitioning of your disk. If your Ubuntu partition is still there, then not all is lost.

So, get an Ubuntu live DVD or USB and boot from it. Then open the Disks application to see what's on your hard disk.

If your Ubuntu partition is still there, then you can install boot-repair and repair Grub.

Open a new Terminal, then type:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair && sudo apt-get update
  • Press Enter.

  • Then type: sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && (boot-repair &)

  • Press Enter

Choose the recommended repair option.

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